SOURCE: Rosenfeld, Natania. “Incongruities; or, The Politics of Character: Departures.” In Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, pp. 81-95. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Rosenfeld juxtaposes the style and themes of the two pieces collected in Two Stories: “The Mark on the Wall,” and Leonard Woolf's “Three Jews.”

Five years after their [Virginia and Leonard Woolf's] marriage, in 1917, the newly founded Hogarth Press issued its first publication. The Woolfs saw their press as an opportunity for creative and intellectual freedom, and as a respite from mental labor. It would enable Virginia to publish what she chose—and thus, more easily, write what she chose—and provide a forum for avant-garde writers whom more conservative publishers might turn away. Its first production was a pamphlet-size volume containing a short story by each member of the couple.

Two Stories encapsulates the fraught dialectic of imagination...