Rent String Quartet

Synopsis

"A good deal of the secret of the charm of Mrs Woolf's shorter pieces consists in the immense disparity between the object and the train of feeling which it has set in motion. Mrs Woolf gives you the minutest datum, and leads you on to explore, quite consciously, the sequence of images and feelings which float away from it. The result is something which makes Walter Pater appear an unsophisticated rationalist, and the writing is often remarkable. The book is one of the most curious and interesting examples of a process of dissociation which in that direction, it would seem, cannot be exceeded." T. S. Eliot

String Quartet is a well curated collection of modernist short stories and flash fictions from an author who felt that "the only thing in this world is music - music and books and one or two pictures", and who, in her earliest years, humorously toyed with the idea of founding a colony "where there shall be no marrying - unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven".

The stories in this collection, which include: The String Quartet, An Unwritten Novel, The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, Blue & Green, Monday or Tuesday, A Society, Kew Gardens, and Solid Objects, are experimental in nature and are quite straightforward examples of the fashionable Modernist stream of consciousness technique which Virginia Woolf was perfecting at that time.

Virginia Woolf is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own, with its dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Virginia Woolf suffered from severe bouts of depression throughout her life and took her own life by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

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