The publication of the short story, "The New Dress" in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories suggests that the story had been well-received when Woolf initially published it in 1927 in the New York monthly magazine the Forum. Woolf chose this story, one of eighteen, for a collection she planned to publish in 1942, but her suicide in 1941 postponed the edition's publication until Leonard Woolf edited the stories in 1944.

Most Woolf scholars have focused on her novels, essays, and diaries. Consequently, the signifi-cance of the short stories in Woolf's canon has been largely overlooked. Leonard Woolf's comments in the foreword to A Haunted House may have contributed to this. He explains that Woolf considered short fiction an interlude, a form of writing that enabled her to relax during or in between writing her novels.

Only a few of her stories ("Kew Gardens," "The Mark on the Wall...