SOURCE: Benzel, Kathryn N. “Woolf's Early Experimentation with Consciousness: ‘Kew Gardens,’ Typescript to Publication, 1917-1919.”¹ In Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries, edited by Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott, pp. 192-99. New York: Pace University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Benzel speculates about the origin, creation, and revision of “Kew Gardens.”

In Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, he describes a park that his character Virginia Woolf envisions in a dream:

It seems, suddenly, that she is not in her bed but in a park; a park impossibly verdant, green beyond green—a Platonic vision of a park, at once homely and the seat of mystery, implying as parks do that while the old woman in the shawl dozes on the slatted bench something alive and ancient, something neither kind nor unkind, exulting only in continuance, knits together the green world of farms and meadows, forests and parks. Virginia...