Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens' Review

The short story Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens (1919) begins with a pleasant description of a garden, specifically one flower-bed. The narrator is able to tell all the details about how life works in this place, the shapes and the colors that exist in flowers or leaves, the effect of the summer light in the petals. A snail with a colorful shell helps to integrate the flow of life as well as birds, dragonflies, butterflies, etc. Suddenly, after the description of the small landscape inside the bed come people passing around the flower-bed.

Apparently, they are telling stories with nonsense to the reader, but in fact it's the point of view of the flower-bed. Considering that the flower-bed can't move to go along with them and show the end of the conversations that those people were having when they were next there, it is possible to propose that people were interfering in the garden's story, not the opposite. It means that, at the same time, it is not the garden which is in the story of that people, although that people are inside the story of the garden.

While life goes on inside the garden, outside people were living their lives with passion, love, regrets, death, experiences, etc., everything that a human being is allowed to do and to feel while living in society. In the middle of the life in the garden, it seems that the narrator opens a parentheses to show how the humans can be. The first situation is a family with a husband and wife and two children. He is wondering about his past, a woman, Lily, that he didn't married. It is possible to perceive in the way he speaks that the garden brings to him significant memories. It is interesting how he shares his thoughts with his wife, who is bored with the conversation, but she does not shake and says that everyone has "ghosts" in memory: for him it's a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly, for her a kiss (WOOLF, 1997) from twenty years ago, apparently from her grandmother, the narrator doesn't let it clear enough. It should be her last memory about this special lady in her childish.

At this point it is necessary to indicate the position of the narrator that besides working in many descriptions about the garden, also it is an omniscient narrator. He knows everything and he can show thoughts and feelings of the characters in the story, as in page 40, for example: "'Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily', he thought" (WOOLF, 1997). And the narrator doesn't interfere with his own conclusions; it is like he would be the spokesperson of the garden. Likewise, the softness used by the narrator to move the story to the garden from the people and vice-versa, as in page 40, after a second description about the flower-bed and how the snail dealt with an obstacle, the topic starts "before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past bed the feet of other human beings" (WOOLF, 1997). Also at one of the last transitions between garden and humans passage, on page 43, "He (the snail) had just insert his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf [...]" (WOOLF, 1997).

Now, at this point, it's essential the description of the man who can talk with spirits and the other man walking with him. This second, the youngest one, has a kind of mystery, or maybe an ambiguity, because he doesn't look bothered with the other man behavior. He was not bothered by the fact that the other man could speak with spirits, fact that could scare most people. Perhaps he could have engaged the man to try to be in contact with someone he would have lost recently. These are just guesses because the text does not provide enough tools for an objective interpretation.

In the third group of people passing there are two elderly women. They are having an unusual dialog; it is how the snippet of text begins in the end of page 42. Maybe it could be a game with words used by them. Continuing to, the next people there are two women passing and one of them is distracted:

"So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the