Together and Apart Themes

In Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf’s third novel, the narrator asserts that “life is but a procession of shadows”; then she asks, “why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us . . . ? For the moment after we know nothing about him.” Although Woolf (through her narrator) is discussing here the difficulty a biographer has in capturing, with words on paper, the essence of an individual, she is also pointing to what she sees as an inescapable fact of human existence: One individual can never completely know another; similarly, one can never completely know oneself because that essentially fluid self is shaded and even, at times, changed by associations with others. This last point (regarding the effect other people have on a personality, as well as on that personality’s view of itself and others) is important to understanding Woolf’s fiction; indeed, she gave expression to this point in all of her novels, in several autobiographical essays, and in a number of her short stories—one of which is “Together and Apart.”

Although both Miss Anning and Mr. Serle naturally have different perspectives and responses to their conversation, and to the party itself (she mildly resents having to abandon her solitary contemplation of the sky for the sake of “empty” conversation with a man whom, she...