In “An Unwritten Novel,” in the same collection, Mrs. Woolf again reveals a power of discernment, as well as the irony which is a part of her large human sympathy, in the conclusion of the story, which opens with:
“Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide over the paper's edge to the poor woman's face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it.”
During a railway journey the writer makes up a novel to fit the face of the old woman opposite her—a story of an old maid whom life had cheated, thwarted, and denied all expression of sex, and left her embittered, resentful, envious, and starved.
“They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret—her sex, they'd say—the scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex!”
When she reaches her destination the old woman is met by her son—and the “story” remains unwritten.
In “A Society,” Mrs. Woolf shies a few brick-bats—and well-aimed ones—at modern feminism. Her gesture is, however, more one of the irresistible impulse of the humourist to enjoy herself than any intention to do serious violence.
The members of the Society, who are a number of young girls bent upon self-education and believing that the object of life is to produce good people and good books, find themselves as a result of their investigations forced to acknowledge that if they hadn't learned to read they might still have been bearing children in ignorance, and that was the happiest life after all. By their learning they have sacrificed both their happiness and their ability to produce good people, and they are confronted, moreover, with the awful thought that if men continue to acquire knowledge they will lose their ability to produce good books.
“Unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare.”
The Society disbands with the conclusion that when a little girl has learned how to read “there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is in herself.”
“Kew Gardens” is as vivid a picture as if it had been painted in colour, of the public gardens on a hot summer day, with their procession of varied humanity, old, young, and in the flush of life, each flashing for a moment with all of its own intense personality, like a figure in a cinema, before the reader, and then passing into the shadow as vague as the breath of the flowers, the buzzing of the dragon-fly, or the memories which for a moment the garden had invoked.