What happens when you strip a story of its plot, its conventional characters, its beginning-middle-end scaffolding - and just listen to a mind think?
I was up past midnight, stacking essays about The Great Gatsby into neat little piles that would never actually be neat, when I put this on. Two hours. That's it. Two hours of Virginia Woolf before she became Virginia Woolf - or rather, two hours of her becoming exactly that. Monday or Tuesday is the 1921 collection where she's still experimenting, still finding the stream-of-consciousness technique that would later power Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. And listening to it in audio form at my kitchen table, red pen in one hand, coffee going cold - it hit different than I expected.
When the Heron Flies and You Forget You're Grading
The title piece, "Monday or Tuesday," is barely two pages long. A heron flying. A coal fire. Truth falling like rain. It's not a story in any way my sophomores would recognize. It's a mood caught mid-flight, and the brevity is the point. Woolf is sketching, not painting. I've been thinking about this kind of concentrated, stripped-down storytelling a lot lately - it's rare, and when it misses, it really misses, which is part of why my notes on Crown kept circling back to whether the author earned that same compression. She's testing what language can do when you unchain it from narrative obligation.
But here's what makes this collection sneakily powerful in audio: pieces like "The Mark on the Wall" and "An Unwritten Novel" are essentially interior monologues. A woman stares at a mark on her wall and spirals through memory, philosophy, the nature of knowledge itself - all before discovering it's a snail. (My students would hate this. I love it.) In print, your eye can skip ahead, skim, lose patience. In audio, you're trapped inside that consciousness. You move at Woolf's speed. You breathe when she breathes. The prose deserves to be savored, and the audiobook format forces you to do exactly that.
"A Haunted House" does something genuinely strange - it tells a ghost story where the ghosts are gentle, searching room to room for a buried treasure that turns out to be the joy of the living couple sleeping upstairs. It's three minutes long and somehow more unsettling and tender than most full-length novels I've taught.
LizMourant and the Problem of Reading a Mind Aloud
Here's where I have to be honest: I don't have a lot of data on LizMourant's specific performance choices, and this is a LibriVox recording, which means volunteer narration with all the beautiful imperfection that implies. The production is clean enough - no background noise disasters, no jarring edits that pulled me out. But Woolf's prose is uniquely difficult to narrate because so much of it exists in the spaces between sentences, in the rhythm of commas, in the way a semicolon asks you to hold two thoughts simultaneously. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation - at least in the quieter pieces - though I found myself occasionally wanting more tonal variation in the longer stretches of "A Society" and "The String Quartet," where Woolf shifts between satirical edge and genuine wonder.
This isn't a knock on LizMourant specifically. Woolf is a high-wire act for any narrator. The sentences loop and double back and sometimes abandon themselves mid-thought, and you need someone who can make that feel intentional rather than confused. For a free LibriVox recording, it does the job. But I'd be lying if I said it elevated the material the way, say, Juliet Stevenson elevates Mrs. Dalloway.
Who Needs This (and Who Should Run)
If you loved Mrs. Dalloway, this is its spiritual ancestor - rougher, more experimental, sometimes frustratingly abstract, but you can feel the foundation being laid. If you're a Woolf completist, it's essential. If you're curious about modernism but haven't waded in yet, this is actually a decent entry point precisely because it's short. Two hours. You can survive two hours of literary experimentation. My students survive my lectures for longer than that. (Allegedly.)
But if you need plot, if you need things to happen in a conventional sense, if stream-of-consciousness makes you want to throw your phone in Lake Michigan - skip this one. "The String Quartet" is literally Woolf attempting to write music in prose. It's gorgeous and also completely maddening if you're not in the right headspace.
Let's talk about what Woolf is really saying in this collection: she's arguing that the moments between events - the Tuesday between the Mondays - are where actual life happens. The mark on the wall matters more than the war outside. The heron matters more than the destination. It's a radical idea in 1921, and honestly, sitting there at midnight with ungraded essays about Gatsby's green light, it felt pretty radical still.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For?
Almost. The Woolf is brilliant. The audio is serviceable. At two hours and zero dollars (it's LibriVox), the barrier to entry is basically nothing. Listen to it on a walk, let the prose wash over you, and don't worry if you don't catch everything. Woolf wasn't sure she caught everything either. That was the whole point.
