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But at night the town looks quite ethereal. There is a white glow on the horizon. There are hoops and coronets in the streets. The town has sunk down into the water. And the skeleton only is picked out in fairy lamps.

the closing words of The Watering Place, likely written in March 1941, the month of Virginia Woolf's death.

The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf is a definitive work resulting from Susan Dick's heroic efforts to assemble all of Woolf's shorter fiction, from her first piece in 1906, "Phyllis and Rosamond", to her last, a month before her death, in 1941, "The Watering Place", into one volume.

This was an undertaking that required significant judgement as to the final form of unpublished works, as well as to the boundary between essay and fiction (I have included in this collection only those short pieces that are, to my mind, clearly fictions, that is, works in which the characters, scenes, and actions are more imaginary than they are factual, and in which the narrator's voice is not necessarily identified with the author). The latter judgement has led to the exclusion of certain works, such as biographical sketches, and the inclusion of others (notably "A Woman's College from Outside") more commonly classed as essays.

Dick's Introduction acknowledges the existence of three previous key partial collections, all of which I have previously read:

- the only collection of short stories published in Woolf’s lifetime, Monday or Tuesday � my review: /review/show...

- the overlapping collection assembled by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s deathA Haunted House and Other Stories - my review: /review/show...

And another collection assembled by Hogarth Press in 1973, but without input from either Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence I review here: /review/show...

I therefore restricted my reading of this book, and in particular my rating, to the pieces not covered by any of the above, which comprised the following:

"Phyllis and Rosamond"
"The Mysterious Case of Miss V"
"The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn"
"A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus"
"Memoirs of a Novelist"
"The Evening Party"
"Sympathy"
"A Woman's College from Outside"
"In the Orchard"
"The Prime Minister" (which became part of Mrs Dalloway)
"Nurse Lugton's Curtain"
"The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story"
"Happiness"
"A Simple Melody"
"The Fascination of the Pool"
"Three Pictures"
"Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer"
"Miss Pryme"
"Ode Written Partly in Prose.."
"Portraits"
"Uncle Vanya"
"Gypsy, the Mongrel"
"The Symbol"
"The Watering Place"

"Phyllis and Rosamond"is a great starting piece as, though very early in her development as a writer, it shows Woolf thinking about the demands of the age on the form:

In this very curious age, when we are beginning to require pictures of people, their minds and their coats, a faithful outline, drawn with no skill but veracity, may possibly have some value.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day's work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the door keeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

And as such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade.

"Happiness" and "A Simple Melody" rather belong with the other stories in Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence, indeed the latter makes for a great companion read with George Carslake, from whose PoV it is written, observing Stuart Elton from Happiness, Mabel Waring from The New Dress (Carslake remarks on her pretty yellow dress but that She looked agitated, and we know from The New Dress that Mabel is insecure in her choice of fashion) and, most deliciously, that angry looking chap with the toothbrush moustache who seemed to know nobody, who we know from "The Man who Loved his Kind" is Prickett Ellis, an old school acquaintance of Richard Dalloway who invited him to the party when he ran in to him in the street.

The appendix to the collection also contains some fragmentary pieces, such as "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday" which features lavender from Sandringham, which Dick correctly comments in her notes likely meant from the then recently founded lavender fields of nearby Heacham. Another Norfolk link comes from The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn, written in 1906 while Virginaia Woolf was staying in Blo'Norton Hall and set in a ficticious country house in the area - We in Norfolk today are much the same as we were in the day of Helen [of Troy], whenever she may have lived.. Mistess Joan writes fearfully of the journey to London via the 15th century equivalent of the M11 in a passage which feels harsh but true of Essex:

There is but one road and it passes through vast lands, where no man live, but only those who have murdered or robbed.

As a carefully assembled, helpfully annotated and comprehensive collection of Woolf's shorter fiction this is highly worthwhile, although I remain a fan of her novels, followed by her essays, with her stories seeming mostly exercises towards the longer form. The marginal effect of this book for me, after the three aforementioned published collections, was also rather diminished, particularly as almost all of the pieces that remain had not been revised for publication by the author. So 3 stars for my reading experience.