A Haunted House

“A Haunted House” appears in the first collection of stories of Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday. This collection contains several stories without a clear plot that sometimes share qualities with both poetry and prose. The stories epitomize Woolf’s approach to writing, which challenged the old dogmas of realism and naturalism and favored experimentation. Major cultural, technological, and political change in the early 20th century (including monarchy-ending revolutions, the rise of cinema, and increasing gender equality) coexisted with artistic developments, as artists and writers (now considered “modernist”) sought to capture the subjective experience of the modern world and break away from their predecessors.

Woolf was a key figure in this literary movement. After her father’s death, she moved in 1904 to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district in London, at the age of 22. There, she helped to form an artistic group called the Bloomsbury Group. This was a group of intellectuals close to Woolf who sought to meet and discuss hot topics of the artistic and political world of the day. Among its members were John Maynard Keynes, who would change post-war economics, and E. M.