Kew Gardens Analysis

The Royal Botanic Gardens in London The entire story is set within these public gardens in London on a summer afternoon in July, and Woolf places special emphasis on the descriptions of this pla...

Third Person (Omniscient) The narrative focuses on the flowerbed and the characters that pass by it, weaving in and out of the minds of numerous individuals to allow us brief insights into their...

Modernist texts generally include literature written between 1899 and 1945, and often involve some sort of experimentation with traditional narrative forms. "Kew Gardens" does not adhere to any t...

Observant/Curious, Awe-inspired The narrator displays an immensely observant and curious tone. He or she is clearly interested in the parsing out the most intricate details of the scene, and r...

Descriptive, Grandiose The narrative gives us an incredibly detailed picture of the natural setting and of the characters' thoughts and demeanors. At points, the story begins to feel like a...

The title here is pretty self-explanatory: "Kew Gardens" references the Royal Botanic Gardens in southwest London, also known as Kew Gardens. By choosing this title, Woolf places the emphasis of th...

The last paragraph of "Kew Gardens" is where Woolf gives us a vision of the whole. The narrative "zooms out" from the descriptions of individuals, flowers, and snails to draw all these different el...

The story is challenging for two primary reasons. First, the density and complexity of Woolf's language makes it pretty advanced reading. You have to pay close attention to her ornate descripti...

The funny thing about this story is that there's not really much of a plot, so it doesn't easily fall into a classic plot analysis. As you can probably tell, there is no primary conflict, no climax...

We're introduced to a flowerbed; a married couple wanders past the flowerbed, reflecting on the past; a snail struggles slowly through the dirt. Before the snail can reach a decision about how...

For the first edition, Woolf's artistic sister Vanessa Bell fashioned two woodcut illustrations to accompany the text. When the third edition was printed in 1927, Bell's illustrations appeared on e...

These characters in this story are prim and proper Brits, so there's nothing too steamy going on here. They're mostly focused on taking their tea, and how sexy can tea get, after all? Neverthel...

The old man's reference to "this war" suggests that the story is situated during World War I.