SOURCE: Greene, Sally. “Brownean Motion in ‘Solid Objects.’” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 50 (fall 1997): 2-3.

In the following essay, Greene assesses the influence of Thomas Browne on Woolf's fiction, particularly “The Mark on the Wall.”

As Woolf refashioned her early empirical realism into a modernist practice, her work began to reflect a deeper engagement with the Renaissance, including the works of an old friend, Sir Thomas Browne. While she was finishing Night and Day (1919), she was embarking on a new direction in short fiction. “The Mark on the Wall” and other stories collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921) reflect, in their impressionistic fragmentation, her new position that “inconclusive stories are legitimate.” Although that statement comes from a review of a collection by Chekhov,¹ it is a conclusion she was also gleaning from Browne.

In September 1919, she remarks that while “making way with my new experiment” in prose style—an experiment...