The Mark on the Wall

Staring at an unidentified mark on her sitting-room wall, the narrator lets her thoughts drift — through snails and Troy, through Shakespeare and superstition, through the whole shape of a life — never quite arriving at an answer, and never needing to. Published in 1917, this was one of Virginia Woolf's first true experiments in stream-of-consciousness, the technique that would define her later masterpieces, distilled here into a single unbroken current of thought. A brief, luminous demonstration of what the modern short story could become.