KEW GARDENS
by Virginia Woolf, 1919

Kew Gardens was first published in 1919 as a small book by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press and later included in the volume Monday or Tuesday (1921). Woolf herself judged it "slight and short" and wrote in her diary: "The worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; & I shall mind a little." Later, however, she was consoled by numerous orders for copies, "a surfeit of praise" from influential friends, and a favorable review in the Times Literary Supplement.

More recent critics find Kew Gardens an important transitional piece in which Woolf "worked out the lyrical, oblique approach in which her best later works would be written." The story, which on one level is simply about "the men and women who talk in Kew Gardens in July," is highly descriptive and visually charged with a sensuous, almost microscopic vision. Describing the "heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves" on "perhaps a hundred stalks" rising from a flowerbed, Woolf writes, "The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, their red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour." Four couples pass across the field of vision: a middle-aged married couple with their two children; a confused old man, accompanied by a young male companion, who hears voices; two "elderly women of the lower middle class … frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do"; and a young man and woman "in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth"—awkward, inexperienced, excited.

One of the curious features of the story is that it is narrated in the third person from the point of view of a snail in the garden, "a unique but ultimately disappointing vantage point," according to one critic, "from which to observe the flow of life. Woolf has not yet found a fictional body to inhabit."

While not entirely successful, Kew Gardens does lay the groundwork for many of the strategies and concerns developed in Woolf's later work. The older couple evokes Woolf's preoccupation with the passage of time and the ghosts of the past. The old man embodies the thin line between eccentricity and genuine madness, an issue of particular interest to Woolf, who was prone to episodes of debilitating depression throughout her life. (She committed suicide in 1941.) The young couple is caught in another space compelling to Woolf, one in which the function and efficacy of language itself are called into question, a space punctuated with "words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far." In the section involving the two old women "piecing together their very complicated dialogue," Woolf examines the "pattern of falling words" and begins to experiment textually: "Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says—" This scene later troubled Woolf, and she worried that it "discredited" the story a little.

She is nonetheless at the beginning here of her lifelong literary project to explore language, substance, human intercourse, consciousness, and, ultimately, reality. "Stylistically, formally," critic Phyllis Rose finds the story "exciting" but "ultimately unsatisfying," in part because although Kew Gardens represents "daring innovations in technique," the author "had not yet found a subject which would allow her to express her humane experience of life." And yet Woolf is not simply experimenting with form but writing about "depth of contentment," "passion of desire," and "freshness of surprise" as she attempts to catch, according to Rose, "the fragmentary, transient nature of what is real, people passing, wisps of conversation, nature in motion, the wafting of life."

The story ends with a long paragraph of dissolving "substance and color" as all life in the garden—"yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children"—appears and then seems to evanesce. But if one truly listens, Woolf maintains, "there was no silence; … like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air."

—Deborah Kelly Kloepfer