Monday or Tuesday presents a collection of short pieces where Virginia Woolf pushes the boundaries of traditional narrative, focusing instead on the luminous halo of consciousness. In the opening sketch A Haunted House, a ghostly couple moves through a home, searching for a buried treasure that turns out to be the light in the heart. A Society follows a group of young women who form an inquiring society after realizing that books written by men are largely worthless, leading them to investigate civilization, scholarship, and war. An Unwritten Novel watches a train passenger construct a tragic interior life for a stranger opposite her, only to have reality shatter her elaborate fiction when the woman meets her son at the station.
In The String Quartet, an audience at a musical performance experiences a rush of wandering thoughts, memories, and romantic daydreams that dissolve into the final cadence. Blue and Green uses stark colour impressions to evoke the heavy drip of glass pools and the blunt movements of sea monsters. Kew Gardens observes the irregular, butterfly-like movements of visitors passing an oval flower bed, weaving their snippets of conversation with the slow, deliberate journey of a snail. Finally, The Mark on the Wall tracks an idle train of thought sparked by a mysterious spot above a mantelpiece, wandering through history, trees, and social conventions before a sudden interruption reveals the mark to be a snail.
The volume reflects Woolf's ongoing preoccupation with how people perceive reality, moving away from rigid plots to capture the way thoughts drift, collide, and settle. The characters are rarely traditional figures with defined arcs; instead, they are vehicles for exploring memory, gender expectations, and the weight of modern civilization. Throughout these pieces, the narrative voice dips beneath the surface of daily life, recording the silent currents that run beneath routine actions, conversations, and social structures. The collection consistently tests the limits of language to express the unspoken connections between individuals and their environment.
