By Dr Oliver Tearle

Written in 1917 around the aforementioned time she wrote 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Kew Gardens' is one of Virginia Woolf's all-time-known short stories. Yet what the story means is far less well-known – if there is one 'meaning' that is ultimately knowable. A short summary and closer assay of 'Kew Gardens' should aid to provide a niggling clarity on what is a rather elusive and delicately symbolic story.

In summary, 'Kew Gardens' focuses on the titular gardens in London, on a hot July twenty-four hours. As and so ofttimes with modernist literature, the focus hither is on a moment or a series of moments, rather than a chiliad, unified narrative or plot. A husband and married woman walk by the bloom bed with their children, all of them lost in their own thoughts: the husband, Simon, thinks well-nigh a woman he'd asked to marry him fifteen years earlier (but whom he never did ally). He asks his wife, Eleanor, if she thinks of the past, and she tells him she remembers existence kissed by an old lady with a wart on her olfactory organ, xx years ago while she and a group of other girls were painting at the side of a lake.

A young man and an older homo walk past the flowerbed adjacent. The old man is gesturing wildly and talks of the spirits who are communicating with him. His conversation implies that he knows of a spiritualist automobile which can be used past widows to communicate with their dead husbands who have been killed in the war. Then he starts talking near the forests of Uruguay which he claims to take visited centuries ago, and our suspicions are confirmed that he's mad.

Next come two elderly lower-middle-class women who detect the mad one-time man from afar, wondering whether he is but eccentric or genuinely insane. After they pass, a young couple – a human being and a adult female – laissez passer by, exchanging brusk comments near the price of the tea at Kew Gardens; he tells her they're lucky it isn't Friday, as they charge people more for the tea on Fridays. He rests his paw on hers, and the narrator remarks that the two of them communicate far more than is obvious through these brusk, commonplace utterances and their body linguistic communication.

Throughout 'Kew Gardens', the narrator returns to the flowerbed, focusing on a snail as it moves through the flowers. It's every bit if we're beingness offered, non the panoramic bird's-centre view we often get with 'omniscient' narration, but instead a ground-level perspective on the world, focusing on the minutiae and the apparently unromantic and unexciting (that snail; it's worth bearing in mind that a snail also features in Woolf's curt story 'The Marker on the Wall').

Yet it may be that that information technology'south non the snail but the 'dark-green insect' that Woolf wishes us to observe hither. The snail, with its definite grade and goal ahead of it, seems to represent the older, more than linear style of narrative which Woolf is moving away from with her modernist short stories. She is more similar the green insect which darts about the identify in a less anticipated and linear manner:

It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular light-green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling equally if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the reverse direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like copse that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture–all these objects lay across the snail's progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead foliage or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

The creature'southward antennae are analogous to Woolf'southward own emphasis on people-watching, on everyday ascertainment, in these short pieces: in some other of her short stories, 'An Unwritten Novel', a woman sits and watches her swain passenger on the railroad train. This is the modernist way of capturing real life: observing, listening out, overhearing snatches of others' conversation, using our own 'antennae'.

In the terminal analysis, although 'Kew Gardens' presents a number of challenges to the reader or critic, Woolf appears to allude, self-referentially, to the new mode of modernist fiction of which her own story is an case: indirect, criss-crossing, picking up voices equally they pass, rather than doggedly pursuing some fixed end-point.

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Bully War, The Waste State and the Modernist Long Poem.