A Haunted House and Other Short Stories

First edition. Small crown 8vo. 128pp. Publisher's crimson cloth, stamped in gilt to spine. Pictorial dustjacket designed by Vanessa Bell and printed black on white (priced 7s. 6d. net on front flap). With a two-page foreword by Leonard Woolf. "First published 1943" stated on copyright page, but issued 31 January 1944. 1/6,000 copies printed.

Gilt lettering to spine slightly dulled, poor quality wartime paper-stock faintly toned to top edge and upper margins, dustjacket darkened to spine and adjacent areas, slightly chipped and torn to crown and along joint-folds, with one fifth of lower spine panel missing, causing fading to the exposed cloth underneath. A Near Fine copy in a Very Good dustwrapper, now protected in a clear sleeve.

A collection of short stories published posthumously, bringing together six of the eight stories from Monday or Tuesday (1921), seven which appeared in magazines between 1922 and 1941, and five hitherto unpublished. These include, 'The Mark on the Wall' (1917), 'Kew Gardens' (1919), and 'An Unwritten Novel' (1920), which DNB brands as "less stories than theoretical expositions of the new form of fiction that she had come upon, back in 1905, in the course of tramps in Cornwall. Her aim was to find in the 'moment of being' a climactic inward event, parallel to what her friend T. S. Eliot termed 'unattended moments' and what James Joyce termed 'epiphany'."

[Kirkpatrick A28a; Woolmer 507]