Monday or Tuesday

In this short collection of experimental stories and sketches, Virginia Woolf tries new ways of catching the flow of the mind: 'The Mark on the Wall', in which a woman's thoughts wander from a mark on her wall to history, nature and war before she discovers what it is; 'Kew Gardens', where scraps of talk from people passing a flower bed mingle with the life of a snail; and 'An Unwritten Novel', in which a passenger on a train invents the life of the woman sitting opposite.

Woolf published the book in 1921 through the Hogarth Press, with woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell, and these pieces prepared the way for the method of Mrs Dalloway. See her life.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.

Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.