Short Story Monday/A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf

You may visit John for more short stories this Monday.

Before I begin, please check the giveaway to see if you are interested in signing up!

On Virginia Woolf's birthday, I've chosen a short story from the collection called Monday or Tuesday, published in 1921. I don't own this book but found all the stories online here.

It seems that death is always somewhere lurking in the works of Virginia Woolf. She has such an awareness of time passing, life changing, and then the final alteration. I suspect this is true of many of us who have lost a parent at a young age. While those with parents still alive have a buffer between them and death, we who are orphans early on have an acute awareness that death can come at any time. We learn to live with it sitting beside us.

When I finished reading A Haunted House, my heart felt full and there were tears in my eyes. It reminded me a little bit of Emily in Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder. After she dies, she gets to spend an ordinary day back among the living, observing the details of daily life we often don't notice.

In A Haunted House, a dead couple comes back to the house where they were happy.

Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.
“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—”

This is not a scary haunted house story. It is warm and moving and I thought, wonderful.