SOURCE: Oxindine, Annette. “Sexing the Epiphany in ‘Moments of Being,’ Woolf's Nice Little Story about Sapphism.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 31 (autumn 1998): 51-61.

In the following essay, Oxindine links the homoerotic and epiphanic moments in “Slater's Pins Have No Points.”

You remember there is a very fine instinct wireless telepathy nothing to it—in women—the darlings—which fizzles up pretenses, and I know what you mean though you don't say it …

—Virginia Woolf to Violet Dickinson, 1903

Critical avoidance of the lesbian intimacy at the conclusion of Virginia Woolf's “Moments of Being: ‘Slater's Pins Have No Points’” has been noted by Avrom Fleishman in his own hesitant focus on the story's homoerotic ending. In an essay examining form in Woolf's short fiction, Fleishman reluctantly concedes that the “crass” subject of homosexuality must be addressed if his analysis of the story's circular structure is to be...