Monday or Tuesday

Published by Hogarth in 1921, Monday or Tuesday is a collection of eight short stories. The set includes the title piece, Monday or Tuesday, which, along with Blue and Green, and, to a lesser extent, A Haunted House, suggest themselves as literary pastiches, closer to impressionism than conventional, plot-driven episodes. Even the longer stories, such as A Society and An Unwritten Novel are insular, relying on stream of consciousness methods to create an approach to expressing a character's feeling towards the exterior world. Where ordinarily, a short story collection will provide a suitable introduction to a novelist, this set serves to push the reader straight into the depths of Woolf's mind set and in doing so gives a strong impression of the modernist bent as it existed in the early twenties. By the time of publication, Woolf would most likely have read Joyce's Ulysses in manuscript form and she would also have been in close contact with T.S. Eliot.