The publication of the short story, ‘‘The New Dress’’ in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories suggests that the story had been well-received when Woolf initially published it in 1927 in the New York monthly magazine the Forum. Woolf chose this story, one of eighteen, for a collection she planned to publish in 1942, but her suicide in 1941 postponed the edition’s publication until Leonard Woolf edited the stories in 1944.

Most Woolf scholars have focused on her novels, essays, and diaries. Consequently, the signifi- cance of the short stories in Woolf’s canon has been largely overlooked. Leonard Woolf’s comments in the foreword to A Haunted House may have contributed to this. He explains that Woolf considered short fiction an interlude, a form of writing that enabled her to relax during or in between writing her novels.

Only a few of her stories (‘‘Kew Gardens,’’ ‘‘The Mark on the Wall,’’ and ‘‘Monday or Tuesday’’) have generated much critical work. There has, however, been some attention given to ‘‘The New Dress,’’ though generally in its relationship to Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. For example, Jean Guiguet organizes Woolf’s stories into three periods: 1917–1921, 1927–1929, and 1938–1940 and explores the connectons between these ‘‘experiments’’ and the development of Woolf’s novelistic technique. However, while he convincingly establishes connections between the short fiction and novels, he reminds us that many of the stories, particularly ‘‘The New Dress,’’ are also ‘‘selfcontained narratives.’’

Although ‘‘The New Dress’’ can stand as an autonomous narrative, Stella McNichol encouraged reading it alongside six other thematically-related stories. Their ‘‘simple narrative and chronological unity ‘‘prompted McNichol to publish them as a collection, which she called Mrs. Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence. While the editor states that one need not read the novels to understand the stories, she cautions that if one wants a thorough understanding of the novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway, the short stories are a good place to begin. Other critics have specifically emphasized the political vision Woolf presents in her short fiction. In Selma Meyerowitz’s 1981 essay, she reads ‘‘The New Dress’’ as a statement of the vulnerability of female characters to class and social discrimination in English society. The short stories, she cautions, not only demonstrate the stream-ofconsciousness narration so familiar to Woolf readers but also show Woolf’s censure of social institutions that deny women access to education and the means to affect social change.