The Mark on the Wall

10 pp. A short work by the feminist author and publisher known for Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, etc. She and her husband Leonard founded The Hogarth Press, and they were both members of The Bloomsbury Group, a literary society composed of numerous important intellectuals and writers of the time. " It was not recognized that the ordeal of consciousness, as developed by George Eliot and Henry James, was Virginia Woolf's starting point for the novel of the future where, as she put it in 'The Mark on the Wall' (1917), her plan was to follow the mental track of 'modest mouse-coloured people … Those are the depths [novelists] will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories.' She discards the pretensions of the great soul for a nondescript old woman in a third-class carriage or a housewife ordering the fish, and relocates the Romantic drama, the awakening to a moment of sublimity, in the domestic scene. This is the source of Virginia Woolf's continuing appeal for most readers: her repeated demonstration that the most humdrum domestic actions, knitting a brown stocking, or dishing out the boeuf en daube, or sewing a dress for a party, can stir moments of inward enlargement, just as a mark on the wall sends the writer's thoughts racing on different tracks, on the history of the house and its occupants or the question of death and after." (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)