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Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday.
Virginia Woolf, on Fiction

Monday or Tuesday (1921) was the only collection of Woolf’s short fiction published in her lifetime.

It comprises eight pieces:
"A Haunted House"
"A Society"
"Monday or Tuesday"
"An Unwritten Novel" (printed in the London Mercury in 1920)
"The String Quartet"
"Blue & Green"
"Kew Gardens" (published privately in 1919)
"The Mark on the Wall" (published in Hogarth Press’s first book Two Stories (1917) alongside a story from Leonard Woolf)

Leonard Woolf was to publish a posthumous collection of Woolf’s stories, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, in 1944. Leonard explained in the foreword

In 1940, she decided that she would get together a new volume of such stories and include in it most of the stories which had appeared originally in Monday or Tuesday, as well as some published subsequently in magazines and some unpublished. Our idea was that she should produce a volume of critical essays in 1941 and the volume of stories in 1942.

In the present volume I have tried to carry out her intention. I have included in it six out of the eight stories or sketches which originally appeared in Monday or Tuesday. The two omitted by me are “A Society,� and “Blue and Green�; I know that she had decided not to include the first and I am practically certain that she would not have included the second.

Oddly, given it's omission, A Society was perhaps my favourite piece here, a form of fictional spin on her later A Room of One's Own, rather poking fun at the idea that men are the great achievers in art and women's role to make house and breed. A group of women meet:

After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous how beautiful they were—how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library.

Poll is distressed because the result of her reading (the other women have, as instructed, left reading to others), almost all of it books written by men, suggest their achievements are not as great as proclaimed. The women form a Society, vowing not to have children until they have investigated this further. One infiltrates ‘Oxbridge� disguised as a cleaner, another a Navy ship disguised as a male Ethiopian prince (this last based on a real-life ‘prank� - - one in which, it must be noted and regretted, Woolf blacked-up).

And meanwhile mankind (the emphasis on ‘man�) start a major war (WW1).

Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven’s sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance. For unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare!

A paper () by Susan Dick suggest three reasons Woolf may have wanted to omit A Society � a) that it is told in a relatively conventional style b) that by 1940 she had made her point's more forcibly and in depth in A Room of One's Own, and c) the story is very tied to its historic context.

a) feels the most pertinent, as the other pieces here are deliberately rather fragmentary. They feel like exercises in the evolution of Woolf's writing and towards her brilliant later novels, notably Mrs. Dalloway (1925), indeed some later stories (later collected in Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence) were precisely that.

Although c) was interesting, in that The String Quartet, published in 1921, is very much of its time and yet oddly pertinent exactly 100 years later, with London rents and the health after-effects of a pandemic occupying the narrator:

If indeed it’s true, as they’re saying, that Regent Street is up, and the Treaty signed, and the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza its after effects

An Unwritten Novel is perhaps the strongest piece overall, as the narrator on a train imagines her way into the life of the woman opposite:

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it.

And yet when she and the woman alight at the end station, and the woman is met by her son:

Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare as bone.

And yet the last look of them—he stepping from the kerb and she following him round the edge of the big building brims me with wonder—floods me anew. Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the street? Where to-night will you sleep, and then, to-morrow? Oh, how it whirls and surges—floats me afresh! I start after them. People drive this way and that. The white light splutters and pours. Plate-glass windows. Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door. Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world!

Overall, an interesting insight into Woolf's development as a writer but not that compelling as a stand-alone read as the collection doesn't really cohere. 3 stars