To apply some of the following material, you will have to number each fifth paragraph of the short story (as signalled by an indention). This story has thirty-three paragrahs.

General Questions

G1. (a) "An Unwritten Novel" is one of the forty-six short fictional pieces to be found in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick (2nd ed.; San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich, 1989). The story originally appeared in The London Mercury (July 1920), and was subsequently slightly revised for inclusion in her book collections of short fiction Monday or Tuesday and A Haunted House. In his masterful, encyclopedically compressed article on Virginia Woolf's short fiction in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, 2nd ed. (ed. Frank N. Magill; 7 vols.; Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press, 1993), and Critical Survey of Short Fiction, 3rd ed. (ed. James Magill; 8 vols.; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 2001), which is attached to these Notes and Questions, the perceptive critic, who has a byline at the end of the article,  points out that the story has distinct affinities with three others in her oeuvre: which three, and how? (b) In prose fiction (short story or novel), the speaking or narrating voice is called "the narrator" to differentiate this person from the author, since frequently the narrator and author are not identical. How does Woolf portray the narrator as a character in this short story? Why, as suggested in Douglas and Lawall's introduction to the short story in NAWM, is the narrator an important character in this short story? How do subsequent notes and questions in my notes and questions also bear on this issue? (c) How might this short story, as well as the works by Katherine Anne Porter, Doris Lessing, and Marguerite Duras assigned in this class, present a "woman's angle" or perspective on things?

G2. (a) Both Douglas/Lawall in the NAWM introduction to Virginia Woolf's short story, and the acute (at least sorta' acute) author of the article on Woolf in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, refer to Woolf's marvelous prose style. What seem to be some of the features of that prose style, as exemplified in "An Unwritten Novel"? Reviewing a composition handbook, such as used in Eng. 101 and Eng. 102 at this college, on diction (word choice) and sentences will provide the foundation for an analysis of prose style. (b) For instance, at the level of sentences and grammar, (a1) how does Woolf expressively use and play off against each other long and short sentences? (b2) Where and how does she repeatedly use parallelism? For example, in P1, how do the sixth and seventh sentences use parallelism? How does the sixth use the absolute construction or absolute phrase? Where else in the short story does Woolf use the absolute phrase (e.g., antepenultimate sentence of P3)? (b3) In what passages, and for what effects, does Woolf add phrasal or clausal modifiers in the middle or at the ends of sentences? (b4) For what thematic or expressive effects does Woolf repeatedly use the punctuation mark of the dash, and the related rhetorical figure of anacoluthon, and what expressive sentence structures are created thereby? (b5) What ideas are conveyed by the repeated interrogative and exclamatory sentences in the story? (b6) How does the repeated use of square brackets in the story help express the story's focus on an author's imagination or consciousness in action? (c) Where, and to express what ideas, does Woolf use figurative language (simile, metaphor, etc.) in the story? How is the frequency or vividness of such figurative language related to Woolf's emphasis on the imagination, the topic identified both in NAWM and in my article and in these Notes and Questions?

G3. (a) Where and how does Woolf use the principles of juxtaposition and association to convey or suggest, first, stream of consciousness, and, second, comparison and contrast between the two items juxtaposed or associated? (b) What ideas about how the mind and imagination work are suggested by Woolf's techniques of juxtaposition and association? (c) How does this story emphasize more the imaginative process than the final or end product created by the imagination? Indeed, how does this story (as with other of her stories) suggest some disillusionment with the end product of the imagination or creative process? (d) How does Woolf's emphasis on the subject of imagination, along with some of her ideas and techniques, relate her work to that of the Romantics? (e) Where and how does Woolf repeatedly emphasize the subject or topic of reality underlying a (sometimes purposefully) deceptive surface, both at the levels of individual psychology and society, in the story? How does this emphasis relate Woolf's short story to the Realism in both the literary and painting traditions? How does this theme interconnect with the very, very (veddy, veddy) British aura of this short story?

G4. Woolf has had some interesting effects on or manifestations in popular culture: specifically movies and jazz. (a) As pointed out by the thoughtful and knowledgeable author of the article on Woolf in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, some of Woolf's longer works straddle generic boundaries, like Orlando, a wild tale of transmigration and transgendering through the centuries. A British film based on this book by Woolf was made in 1993 and is available on videocassette. (b) One of the most famous plays in modern American drama by one of the handful of great modern American playwrights, Edward Albee, is called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, about a disintegrating marriage; a film version, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and George Segal, which garnered Academy Award nominations, is available on videocassette. (c) Finally, one of the numerous albums by the greatest of all jazz organists, Jimmy Smith (see the article on him in the well-worth-owning paperback reference book The Da Capo Companion To Twentieth Century Popular Music, eds. Phil Hardy and Dave Laing [New York: Da Capo, 1995]), is called Jimmy Smith: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Verve V6-8583, 1964), based on the music score by Don Kilpatrick and Kevin Knox for the New York production of Albee's play. Two tracks on the album have differing versions of the rousing up-tempo album title tune, with arrangements by and band under the direction of the legendary Oliver Nelson.

Specific Questions

1. (a) What ideas or themes might be suggested by the emphasis on the background of World War I (in par. 2) as part of the story's setting? How was war important in Virginia Woolf's own life? (b) Besides practicality or practicability, what might the symbolism be of the narrator's using the [London] Times as a barrier or screen between her and the object of her interest or imagination (pars. 1-3)?

2. (a) Given the narrator's concentration in pars. 1-3, what is the comic irony of what the narrator fails to notice, as stated in par. 4? (b) Why might the narrator "pray" (why this word, and why repeated?) in par. 4 that the remaining other passenger stay in the railroad car, rather than leave? Why "pray," in the first place (para. 4), that he stay? (c) How in par. 4, and elsewhere in the short story, does Woolf raise the topic of humanity's relationship to the material world (things in the material world), a repeated concern in much of Woolf's fiction? How is this subject broached, as well, in works of the Realist tradition such as Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard?

3. (a) How does the train window, repeatedly mentioned in the short story (starting from par. 5), become symbolic? Of what? (b) What might the symbolism be of the narrator's rubbing a spot on the window (par. 8)? Of "Minnie's" having done the same thing? (c) How do the similes in pars. 5 and 6 describing the "unhappy woman" in the railroad car broach the subject of the connection between mind/imagination and body/(material or physical world)? Is there such a connection, in your personal experience or observation? (d) How does Woolf in these paragraphs and others explore what we have come in the last half of the twentieth century to term "body language" (or, more technically, "kinesics")? (e) What might be the suggestions of the fowl/poultry similes being applied to both the narrator and "Minnie"? (f) How does the identification or empathy of narrator and "Minnie" become a motif in this story, and how does it bear on the issues of literary authorship, feminism, and humanity?

4. (a) What instances in this short story are pointed out by Douglas and Lawall in their introduction and notes in NAWM of stream of consciousness or of association, as to how one part of the paragraph or story moves to the next part of the paragraph or story? (b) How does the name the narrator gives her train companion's sister-in-law in P9 derive from principles of association, especially with reference to the physical traits the narrator imagines of the sister-in-laaw (hint: the sister is rather hulking, as imagined by the narrator), including a bathycolpian or bathycolpous (or bathukolpian, bathykolpous: see the Oxford English Dictionary) physique? How is the narrator following up on a typical (British) disparaging phrase that "Minnie" uses for her sister-in-law in S1P6? (c) In Woolf's fiction, including this story, as well as Katherine Anne Porter's "Flowering Judas," how do both women writers attach negative suggestions to bathykolpianism? What might be going on here, psychologically and with reference to gender? (d) How might the narrator have arrived, through association, at the details about Hilda, including Hilda's name, through the underlying or subconscious concept of Hilda as an opposite to Minnie? (e) How, based on her being opposite to Hilda, and in many ways diminished, as observed in the train car, does the narrator arrive, through imagination or association, at the forename "Minnie" for her train companion? (f) What in Minnie's forename suggests, through association, oppositeness to all the features of Hilda described?

5. (a) How might the surname of the two sisters lead, through the narrator's imaginative or subconscious association, to details of the setting (shell box, rain, wet) in P10? (b) How might the earlier details in the story (up through par. 9) concerning a stain and twitch lead, in the narrator's imagination or associative processes, to the narrator's focus in the story on Minnie's relationship to religion (par. 10 and following)? How does the fishing rod at the beach pier (P10) lead, in the narrator's imagination or associative processes, to a conception of God in P10? (c) How does the narrator's imagination or associative process lead her through various crimes that Minnie might have committed, in P11-12? How have the narrator's thoughts about religion in P10 led, through imagination and association, to thoughts about crime in P11-12? (d) How does psychological or imaginative association lead from friends to ferns in S3P14? How do the ferns become a motif or symbol (Minnie's being obscured, nature's fertility, concealment versus revelation) in the story? (e) How does Minnie's remark toward the end of P14 interrupt the narrator's free-wheeling imagining or associating? How does what Minnie refers to in this passage become a symbol of the questions surrounding Minnie's life: her true identity, womanhood, and fulfillment as a woman and person, as well as the artist's (or any sensitive person's) ability to "read" her? (f) How does the narrator's echo of Minnie's remark suggest something about humane and artistic identification or empathy?

6. (a) How do the eggs in P14 lead, in the narrator's imagination and associative processes, to a focus on the narrator's imagined potential but unfulfilled romance of Minnie in pars. 16-22? (b) What might the sexual or romantic-love overtones of the potential suitor's occupation (which does have a bearing on the suits part of suitor), mentioned in these paragraphs? (c) What lurking pun, connected to 6a and 6b, is there in the narrator's introduction of the suitor in the following sentence: "Moreover, I feel, pleasantly pricking through the green fretwork and over the glacis of cut glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man opposite--one's as much as I can manage"(par. 16)? (d) What might the symbolism be, related to romantic love, of what Minnie's brooch is (par. 25)? (e) How when the "real" Minnie gets off the train, does the narrator discover that all this imagining or associating about Minnie's unfulfilled love life is incorrect, in "reality" (that is, the reality described by Woolf, standing behind the narrator)? (f) How does this ending link Woolf with Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Chekhov?