Monday or Tuesday

This article is about Virginia Woolf's 1921 short story collection. For the 1966 Yugoslav film, see Monday or Tuesday (film).

Monday or Tuesday
1st edition (UK)
Author(s)	Virginia Woolf
Illustrator	Vanessa Bell
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Short story
Publisher	Hogarth Press (UK) Harcourt Brace (US)
Publication date	1921
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	91 [1]
ISBN	NA

Monday or Tuesday is a 1921 short story collection by Virginia Woolf published by The Hogarth Press. 1000 copies were printed with four full-page woodcuts by Vanessa Bell^[2]. Leonard Woolf called it one of the worst printed books ever published because of the typographical mistakes in it.^[3]. Most mistakes were corrected for the US edition published by Harcourt Brace^[4]. It contained eight stories:

• "A Haunted House"
• "A Society"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "An Unwritten Novel" - previously appeared in the London Mercury in 1920
• "The String Quartet"
• "Blue & Green"
• "Kew Gardens" previously published separately
• "The Mark on the Wall" - previously appeared in Two Stories (1917)

Six of the stories were later published by Leonard Woolf in the posthumous collection A Haunted House, those excluded were "A Society" and "Blue & Green".^[5]

Title

In her 1919 work Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf explains her new approach to writing :

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday

This last phrase "the life of Monday or Tuesday", is what Woolf believed to be at the core of fiction; and from it came the title of this, her first short story collection^[6], and the only selection she published herself.

References

1. ^ http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/mint/01945.shtml
2. ^ http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/mint/01945.shtml
3. ^ http://warlight.tripod.com/WOOLF.html Virginia Woolf and Her Work: Proceedings of the Fifth METU British Novelists Seminar 13–14 March 1997: 41-51.
4. ^ Note on the Text, page xi of Monday and Tuesday publ. Hesperus Press, 2003
5. ^ Note on the Text, page xi of Monday and Tuesday publ. Hesperus Press, 2003
6. ^ http://www.raco.cat/index.php/LinksLetters/article/viewFile/22738/22572 Parody and metafiction: Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’

External links

• Online Text
• Monday or Tuesday - Modernism Lab Essays