“Monday or Tuesday” is a short story collection that was written by one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf, between 1917-1921. This collection was published by The Hogarth Press, London, and it included eight stories: A society, A Haunted House, Monday or Tuesday, An Unwritten Novel, The String Quartet, Blue and Green, and Solid Objects. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s previous works: “The Voyage Out” and “Night and Day”, the collection had not met a great acclaim; the collection did not succeed in selling more than 300 copies in the first week of its publication.
The stories in the collection that faced approval were “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” and “An Unwritten Novel” because of its remarkable and new style. The failed ones were “Monday or Tuesday” and “Blue and Green”. Even Woolf herself said in 1930 “They are mere tangles of words; balls of string that the kitten...has played with. They were the wild outbursts of freedom, inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable mere outcries.” And she said also that she didn’t intend to reprint them. Furthermore; when her husband Leonard Woolf republished her stories, namely the collection “A Haunted House” after her death, he left out “blue & green” and “A Society”.
All of the eight short stories, in the “Monday or Tuesday” collection, are written in the stream-of-consciousness style, which allows her to take her readers into different minds, views, and surroundings; trying to unravel the complex internal world of emotions and memory. In fact, she is probably the best writer to use this style.
