If fiction was not to be Leonard’s ultimate direction, seven years as an administrator in Ceylon had taught him much about office management and meticulous accounting. His networks in politics and journalism, his honed commissioning instincts and excellent business sense, enabled him to steer a profitable course for the Press.

Virginia was inspired by her readers’ reactions. ‘I’m very glad you liked the story,’ she replied to David Garnett:

In a way its easier to do a short thing, all in one flight than a novel. Novels are frightfully clumsy and overpowering of course; still if one could only get hold of them it would be superb. I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form.

She had made her ‘mark’ – with a new and distinctive voice – and her story augured a change in her writing. It was ‘very amusing to try with these short things,’ she continued ‘and the greatest mercy to be able to do what one likes – no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing.’

This was said through gritted teeth, as she would deliver her next novel, Night and Day, to the publishers Duckworth.

But at Hogarth House, with its green-carpeted dining room, she would also write the stories of Monday or Tuesday, the novel Jacob’s Room, and embark on Mrs Dalloway. It was important that she and Leonard published these titles themselves, albeit now using out-of-house printers for longer books with substantial print runs. Not only did they expand the list to include many writers which, according to Leonard, ‘the commercial publisher would not look at,’ they also made room for their in-house writer Virginia. They had created a ‘strange offspring’, but it was a Press they could call their own.

CLARA FARMER
Publishing Director
Chatto & Windus and Hogarth

London, April 2017

FURTHER READING

For first-hand accounts, see Leonard Woolf’s autobiographies, Beginning Again (1964) and Downhill All The Way (1967) and Virginia Woolf’s Diaries (ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 1977–84) and Letters (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 1975–80). For a full-length work on the press, see J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: the Hogarth Press 1917–1941 (1992); a bibliography of early publications is provided by J. Howard Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946 (1986). For a biographical account, brilliantly contextualizing the Press in the life and work of the Woolfs, see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996). For illustrations of the books themselves, see Elizabeth Willson Gordon’s beautifully produced Woolf’s-head Publishing: the Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press (2009).

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Two Stories does not appear to have gone through rigorous proofreading; or perhaps the Woolfs deemed the occasional misprint unimportant, once weighed against the job of dismantling the inked type and reworking the ‘chase’ to make a correction.

The text printed here, in a version of the Caslon font they used, follows the 1917 version of ‘The Mark on the Wall’, retaining words and phrases removed from later editions. But this is not intended as a facsimile, and any typos or missed spacings in the original have not been reproduced.