"These Ghost Figures of Distorted Passion": Becoming Privy to Working-Class Desire in "The Watering Place" and "The Ladies Lavatory"

Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction is a critically neglected field. Class is the determining factor that influences how women occupy private and public space and articulate desire in Woolf's 1906-41 shorter fiction. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts in The Monks House Papers as well as the Berg Collection, this new reading establishes the oscillating patterns of elision, idealization and contempt that mark stagings of working-class and lesbian bodies and desires in Woolf's prototypical shorter fiction including "The Watering Place" and "The Ladies Lavatory."