NCERT Book Class 12 English (kaleidoscope) Non Fiction 2 The Mark on the Wall

136/KALEIDOSCOPE

2
The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate Virginia Woolf
shades of mental experience. 1882-1941

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red