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Kew Gardens | Introduction

The story was published on May 12, 1919, by Hogarth Press, a publishing enterprise cofounded by Woolf and her husband Leonard in 1917. For the first edition, Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell fashioned two woodcut illustrations to accompany the text. When the third edition was printed in 1927, Bell’s illustrations appeared on each page throughout the text.

The story was also reprinted in Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday (1921) and in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944), edited by Leonard Woolf. In the past decades it has been anthologized many times, representing a slice of Woolf’s artistic mastery and reflection of her keen insight into what it means to be human.

Kew Gardens Summary

The story begins by setting the garden scene: a mild, breezy, summer day in July with ‘‘perhaps a hundred stalks’’ of colorful flowers, petals unfurled to meet the sunlight. The light hits not only the flowers in an ‘‘oval-shaped flower-bed’’ but the brown earth from which they spring and across which a small snail is slowly making its way. As human characters saunter thoughtfully or chattily through the garden and through the story, the narrator returns again and again to descriptions of the garden and the snail’s slow progression.

Men and women meander down the garden paths, zigzagging like butterflies, as the narrator hones in on particular conversations. The first group the reader meets is a husband and wife walking just ahead of their children. The husband, Simon, privately reminisces about asking a former girlfriend to marry him. As he waited for her answer, he hoped that the dragonfly buzzing around them would land on a leaf and that Lily would then say yes. The dragonfly never settled and Lily never said yes. Now, as he turns to his wife Eleanor, he wistfully remembers dragonflies and silver shoe buckles.

Simon then asks his wife if she ever thinks of the past; she replies, ‘‘‘Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under trees?’’’ She tells her husband that when she was just six years old she received ‘‘‘the mother of all my kisses all my life.’’’ When painting in the garden, a grey-haired old woman suddenly and quietly kissed the back of her neck. The family vanishes as the mother calls to Caroline and Hubert and the narrator tells of the snail beginning to move, his antennae quivering as he navigates a leaf that has fallen in its path.

The second set of feet walking by the flower bed belong to an elder and younger man. The younger man, William, walks steadily with an ‘‘expression of perhaps unnatural calm’’ as his companion talks ‘‘incessantly’’ and walks erratically, smiling and murmuring as... » Complete Kew Gardens Summary