Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens
Virginia Woolf
Description
Set in the eponymous botanic garden in London on a hot July day, the narrative gives brief glimpses of four groups of people as they pass by a flowerbed. The story begins with a description of the oval-shaped flowerbed. Woolf mixes the colours of the petals of the flowers, floating to the ground, with the seemingly random movements of the visitors, which she likens to the apparently irregular movements of butterflies.
The first group to pass by are a married couple, and the man, called Simon, recalls his visit fifteen years earlier when he begged a girl called Lily to marry him, but was rejected. Again Woolf centres the apparent randomness of the decision on the flitting of a dragonfly, which if it stops would indicate that Lily would say 'yes', but instead it kept whirling around and around in the air. Wikipedia