Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf6/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees 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. Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf 5.0 (2) Paperback 5.99 Hardcover 13.00 Paperback 5.99 eBook 2.99 Audiobook 0. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Kew Gardens is a short story written by Virginia Woolf and originally published in 1919. She is more like the green insect which darts about the place in a less predictable and linear fashion: ![]() By the end of World War I, the British Army had dealt with over 80,000 cases of shell shock in its returning soldiers. ![]() The snail, with its definite course and goal ahead of it, seems to represent the older, more linear style of narrative which Woolf is moving away from with her modernist short stories. Virginia Woolf took great interest in the effects of war on soldiers, particularly shell shock, a term coined after World War I to describe the effects of wartime trauma. Yet it may be that that it’s not the snail but the ‘green insect’ that Woolf wishes us to observe here. ![]()
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