Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Nóra Séllei

Critical Essay by Nóra Séllei

SOURCE: Séllei, Nóra. “The Snail and The Times: Three Stories ‘Dancing in Unity.’” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 189-98.

In the following essay, Séllei finds thematic and stylistic similarities in “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “An Unwritten Novel.”

“[Y]esterday I … arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in ‘An Unwritten Novel’—only not for 10 pages but 200 or so—doesn't that give the looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that get closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything?” asks Virginia Woolf in her diary in January 1920, and adds “conceive ‘Mark on the Wall,’ ‘K[ew]. G[ardens].’ and ‘Unwritten Novel’ taking hands and dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover; the theme is a blank to me; but I see...
(read more)