This collection deserves four stars because it contains some of Woolf's most succesful experiments in fiction writing. The collection is of great importance for the understanding of Woolf's later work as these stories represent her first attempt (after the more traditional The voyage out and Night and day) to break away from traditional narrative forms. The most interesting in this respect are Kew Gardens, The Mark on the wall, and An unwritten novel.
In Kew Gardens VW concocts something which, in my opinion, one can only term an impressionist painting in words. She gives a vivid description of a single day in Kew Gardens. It is as it were, as if the author/protagonist has hidden herself in the flower bed to describe the insect life, the plant life, the fragments of conversation of passers-by, the different phases of daylight which pass.
In the other two stories VW uses the stream of consciousness-technique as a structural device. The mark on the wall describes the thoughts of a woman as she is smoking a cigarette and staring at a mark on the wall. It is fascinating to see how VW turns such a potentially dull subject into a wonderfully convincing associative prose poem which takes in the beauty of flowers, the life of trees, the current social order, the value of civilization, all revolving around the obscure mark from which the reverie began.
In an unwritten novel VW employs a similar stream of consciousness technique. Moreover, it has the additional value of providing us with information on how VW saw herself as a novellist. In this story the female protagonist turns the woman opposite her into a fictional character, endowing her with a certain character, imagining her life story. Although it turns out that the protagonist's fiction is mistaken, this only provides added fuel for the development of yet another fictional reverie.
The story 'A society' also deserves separate mention here. It raises a wide range of questions concerning the position of women in a male dominated society. VW does not provide clearcut answers thus stressing that the complexities surrounding this subject are enormous and suggesting that each woman will have to provide her own answer to these poignant matters. The manner in which VW raises these feminist issues sufficiently compensates the story's lack of convincing narrative, its incoherent structure, and its patchy character depictions.
On the whole, then, this collection is well worth reading. Most stories (except a society) have the character of prose poems, the language is often poetic, lyrical, elegiac. Woolf herself once wrote that she was trying to invent a new form, somewhere inbetween prose and poetry, a form which she once termed elegy. This collection shows that in an early stage in her career she could already succeed remarkeably well in achieving that form. ( )