“A Haunted House and other stories” is a collection of Virginia Woolf’s stories that was published in 1943. The cover displays a monochromatic illustration of a vase of flowers underneath the title. Inside the front cover, is a torn piece of paper with a blurb for another book, “Virginia Woolf – Her Art as a Novelist” by Joan Bennett. To me, holding one of the early copies with this slip inside emphasized the magnitude of her work. The fact that decades later people continue to study and enjoy her work. Seeing the object in person furthered my understanding of the text in two main ways. First, it provided context for the stories and Woolf. Second, the order and layout of the book impacted each story that we read.
The collection was published in 1943 after Woolf’s death in 1941. It was published by Hogarth Press which is the company that Virginia and her husband set up together. One of the aspects that provided context was the foreword written by her husband, Leonard. Not only does the content give important context to the collection but it also provides insight into her and their relationship. When he discusses which stories he chose not to include in the collection he says “I know that she … I am practically certain that she…”. To me, this seems to be someone who knows her and her work incredibly well. Further, he writes about her writing process with her short stories, “rewrite it, sometimes a great many times”. I wonder how she would feel about some of her unpublished, unedited stories being published. The illustration is by her sister, Vanessa Bell, who was a fellow member of the Bloomsbury group. The involvement of her family and symbolism of flowers combined with the foreword seem to be a type of memorial of her and her work.
The order of the stories we read are as follows “A Haunted House”, “The Mark on the Wall” and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”. “A Haunted House” is followed by “Monday or Tuesday” which was published as the first story in her first collection. Having, “A Haunted House” as the first story furthers the idea of the collection as a memorial. It follows a pair of ghosts as they search through a house looking for their “buried treasure”. They find it in a couple that lay sleeping. Perhaps it relates to Leonard finding memories and ghosts of their relationship after her passing.
Personally, “The Mark on the Wall” reminds me of the illustration. The story is about someone looking at a mark on the wall and wondering what it is and how it got there. The explanations range from possible to fantastical, but we are taken on this stream of consciousness with the character. It ends with the realization that it is a snail. The illustration is a vase of flowers against an abstract patterned room. I see a connection between the two where the reality contrasts against the wild and abstract but ultimately reality is what grounds us in the foreground.
“The Lady in the Looking-Glass” was the only story of the ones that we read that had appeared in magazines and was not published in the prior collection. Knowing this, it made me consider the story as a work by itself more than its role in the collection. The subtitle and the same phrase at the beginning and end does makes it seem like a independent work. It also makes it stand out from the other works as it doesn’t end in a discovery, rather a warning to the reader about what may be discovered. The subtitle of “the reflection” furthers this warning as it has the double entendre of reflection as in the mirror and as in looking back on one’s life. Finally, seeing the cover of the collection made me more aware of the descriptions in the story, specifically the frequent appearance of flowers.
One thing that the three stories have in common is the story being a change of perspective: the birds-eye view of the relationships, the stripped view of Isabella and the endless possibilities for the mark on the wall. Another is that they are being told in a stream of consciousness form, or close to one. The collection is published with no gaps between the stories which makes them feel less like individual stories and more like chapters of a continuous experience. This seems to align with the shared nature of the writing. Finally, the order of the stories was not her crafting, I wonder if she would have made any changes to the order and what they would be.
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