Virginia Woolf - Street Haunting

In Tamara's words - this was a gift from her of a while back - a slight portion of Woolf, but a pleasing selection nonetheless. Part of the delightful pocket series put out by Penguin a while back in honour of their 70th birthday, it contains six story-vignettes (the line between fiction and personal essay is blurred in most of them) in characteristic style. As is usual with writers better known for their longer form prose, the pieces here have a different feel from her novels - they're less weighty (which is hardly surprising), and seem less perfectly formed and rounded off (which is perhaps less predictable, but may - I don't know - have something to do with the circumstances of their composition) ... there are some tendencies towards over-preciousness, perhaps - writing from the perspective of a snail, for example - and some unexpected, but (not that I've thought about it) not entirely inapt, resonances of Emily Dickinson in places, too.