Preview of The Mark on the Wall Summary:

Just as the artists whose work was shown in the Post-Impressionist Exhibition were interested in seeing the world in new ways, Woolf at least since that show in 1910 was thinking about the limits and restrictions of familiar forms of literary expression. At the time that she was writing the short pieces that appeared in Monday or Tuesday (1921), she was also writing and continually revising her ideas about "Modern Fiction" in the essay of that name that eventually was published in 1925 in The Common Reader. A theme that runs through that work, restated on several occasions, is that: The writer seems constrained not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love, interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole . . .

Woolf felt it was essential to escape from this confinement. Her...