The Later Short Stories

Like Between the Acts, these stories definitely had a different feel to them than most of the work we've read by her. "Lappin and Lapinova" was cute, of course, but the two that really interested me were "The Legacy" and "The Jeweller." Both of these are perfect examples of the 180 degree turn her fiction has taken later in life. I mean, if we think back to "The Mark on the Wall" and "Kew Gardens," it is astonishing to see the difference in tone, theme and subject matter in these two stories; now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed each of them tremendously--but the gulf between them is huge. "The Jeweller" for instance reminds me very much of an O. Henry-ish ironic twist at the end. "The Legacy" is almost Poe-like in its buildup of tension before the final reveal; what's not in them, however, is the experiments with the mind that we've probably, by this point, all but gotten used to seeing; in "Lappin and Lapinova" this is true as well.

I suppose there are myriad possible reasons for this. Perhaps she was doing the same thing in these short stories as she was in Between the Acts, and writing thing she knew would appeal to the common reader. Perhaps the simple fact that it was war-time and bombs were falling nightly and air raid sirens pealed through the pre-dawn sky that she wrote, shall we say, more genre pieces? Or perhaps she simply was moving in a new direction with her fiction. She'd done the experimental mind/consciousness thing, the examination of classes and gender roles thing, all the "serious business," as we could call it...perhaps these last stories were a way for her to just have a bit of fun.

I mean let's face it, these stories are fun. Which is not the same thing as lacking in meaning or emotional weight: obviously the eponymous jeweller in his story has feelings for the duchess, and his actions are torn between the overbearing portrait of his mother and what the duchess wants him to do. Likewise, an wonderful, loving relationship is poignantly examined with a metaphysical conceit in "Lappin and Lappinova." "The Legacy" deals a lot with love too...hmmm, all three of these stories have a major theme of love...interesting. I didn't even plan to go here, but Woolf's taking a rather optimistic attitude isn't she? My original point, however, was that these stories are fun and still carry all the weight of her other works.