The Bloomsbury Short Story

Abstract

This article examines the importance of the short story form for the Bloomsbury writers and how their aesthetic theories influenced its composition, structure and content. Often overlooked in the history of the genre, the Bloomsbury short story has a claim to be an important aspect of the twentieth-century accounts of the short story form. Attention to Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, E.M. Forster and others, such as Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence, indicates their widespread engagement with the genre and the ways in which they treated it from fragmented conversation, as in Woolf’s “The String Quartet,” to Foster’s employment of linear narrative detail in “The Road from Colonus.” Formal experiments with syntax, imagery, and vocabulary and prose rhythm exhibit the seriousness of the short story for Bloomsbury authors. The influence of the Russians is particularly important with Chekov dominating the reading and writing of Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence and others. The very form of publication—mostly journals and magazines—is also crucial in shaping the length and structure of the short story. Attention to experimentation, as well as renewal, of the genre balances the impact of the short story on writers today and the question of a successor to the efforts and achievements of Bloomsbury’s authors. A reading of the short stories of Julian Barnes explores this possibility.