I am discovering that the more I read of Virginia Woolf the more I like her and the more easily I understand her. Perhaps she is what we call an acquired taste. She might certainly be a taste worth acquiring.

The Mark on the Wall was her first published short story and is a remarkable stream of consciousness piece that resounds with depth. As our narrator sits in her home observing a mark on her wall, she ponders the possibilities of what the mark might be and strays into thoughts about society, the place of women in it, how we deal with our own self-image, how Shakespeare was inspired to write, what the afterlife will be like…in short, any number of subjects totally unrelated to the mark. It is when the thoughts she is having stray into uncomfortable areas that she brings herself back to the mark on the wall, as if it were an important issue to discover its origin and identity.

The prose is heady and descriptive:

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps – but these generalizations are very worthless.

In the course of this very short story, Woolf travels in and out of some very dense and profound thought. She keeps bringing herself back to the mundane mark on her wall, but she cannot keep herself there, for her internal life is too complex and aware to be caged. It wanders of its own accord into deeper places. I think she is already developing that exploration of the roles of women in a man’s world, that need for her own space, that rejection of the feminine mystique of being satisfied with the role of wife and mother. The story seems almost seminal.

I am convinced that I need to re-read [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1646148221l/14942._SY75_.jpg|841320]. It was my first Woolf and, being young, I dismissed it rather too perfunctorily. I’m betting Woolf was saying a lot more than I was hearing back then.
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