A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is one of those writers whose work I feel I’ve read almost all of, but then I check back and am shocked to discover that, actually, no, I’m nowhere near…

Woolf has a handful of novels I don’t know, and lots of diaries, letters, and – of course – essays that I’ve never touched…

she also has some short fiction…

Not a lot of it, and it clearly wasn’t something she was passionate about as a form…

Yes.

This posthumous collection (A Haunted House (1944)) of short fiction was edited and collated by her husband, Leonard Woolf, and includes a handful of pieces that were published in magazines and papers during her lifetime, a few unpublished pieces, and most (but not all) of her only other short story collection, Monday or Tuesday, which was published early in her career, in 1921.

Leonard [Woolf] doesn’t include all of the writing from that earlier book here because, as he writes in the introduction, he was pretty certain that Virginia [Woolf] wouldn’t have wanted some of those pieces republished… but the fact that Monday or Tuesday was out of print for decades clarifies that she probably didn’t want any of it republished… This is reflected in the quality of the pieces here… which aren’t all bad but they are all slight…

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There’s an amusing piece from the perspective of a snail watching visitors wander through Kew Gardens… there are a few pieces exploring conversations between guests in the drawing room[s] of Mrs Dalloway… There’s a nice story about an elite, “self-made”, jeweller who knowingly allows an aristocratic woman to sell him fake jewels for big cash with the unspoken agreement that he’ll be able to marry her titled daughter… and there are some nice very short pieces that are more like sketches or preludes to longer explorations of ideas…

It’s not a bad collection of writing, at all!

There are enjoyable images, enjoyable phrases, characterisation is quickly achieved and expertly realised…

But all of these pieces are essentially flashes, rather than in-depth texts, with the longest being under 20 pages and almost everything in this book comfortably under 10.

Obviously, length of a piece is no guarantee of quality, and the excellent novella-length short[er] fiction of Doris Lessing, for example, isn’t great because it’s longer than these pieces, but because of the quality of writing and thought that goes into their construction… These pieces aren’t disappointing because Virginia Woolf isn’t great at writing, they are disappointing because Virginia Woolf is!

Woolf was someone who wrote several incredibly powerful, incredibly important, incredibly influential texts, and everything within A Haunted House is far inferior to that…

Yes, there is interiority… yes, there is description… yes, there is narrative… yes, there is characterisation…

But something, and not merely length and complexity, is absent…

These are minor works by a major writer.

This is Virginia Woolf doing the equivalent of an elite athlete warming up, or training, even… I’m not a person who’s interested in watching pro-sports, let alone watching training for pro-sports, and this does almost feel like that…

Leonard [Woolf] is open in his introduction about the fact that Virginia [Woolf] didn’t consider these to be her best works… these weren’t pieces that she wanted collated and together in the hands of the public!

It’s understandable [following the death of a major writer] for something like this to exist, and though there are several examples of great posthumous publications (Hear Us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place, Lunar Caustic, Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid by Malcolm Lowry, arguably (not necessarily an opinion I agree with) The Pale King, A Moveable Feast, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, others, including the end of À la recherche du temps perdu), this isn’t one of them!

So, the lesson I learned here, I suppose, is that if I want to read more Virginia Woolf, I need to focus on the texts that she thought were finished and perfect and good, rather than the ones her husband published after her death…

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There is one piece in here, though, that does still haunt me a few days on from reading it, and that was the narrative of a double suicide…

A politician is half-arsedly mourning the death of his wife in a vehicular accident, while her private secretary mourns the slightly earlier death of her brother. The MP sits at his wife’s desk and reads through her diaries, the only thing she has left for him. On those pages and in her hand, he discovers that the secretary’s working class radical firebrand brother killed himself as the wife refused to leave her shit marriage for him, but then once he was gone, she realised she should have done and jumps in front of a car…

Given Woolf’s own suicide a short time before this was published, it’s difficult to not see this as the heftiest piece in the book, but (then again) that’s possibly just me projecting due to the biographical detail, and maybe it isn’t a particularly beautiful piece, it’s just merely the most relevant.

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All in all, as a collection of writing it’s not terrible, but it’s not exciting, it’s not mesmerising, and it is far from the unequivocally spectacular expectations one usually has when opening a book by this master of modernism.

Avoidable, I suppose…