In the following essay, Kloepfer presents an overview of "Kew Gardens" through its characters.

"Kew Gardens" was first published as a small book by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press (1919) 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...