The Mark on the Wall Study Guide

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen to a wealthy family in South Kensington as the seventh child in a family of eight. Woolf’s youth was defined by an expansive but informal literary education directed by her father, Leslie Stephens (Woolf never had the opportunity for formal education), as well as by the premature death of her mother and half-sister. Woolf met her future husband Leonard Woolf as a member of the famous Bloomsbury circle of intellectuals, which she took part in along with her sister Vanessa Bell, and which included figures like E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell. The group was known both for its intellectual force and bohemian tendencies, with sexual fluidity, artistic production, and modern values all marking a dramatic shift from Woolf’s Kensington upbringing and influencing her later works. Though Woolf is most famous as a defining voice in modernist literature thanks to her various works of fiction, she was also a prolific essayist and kept diaries that were published posthumously. Woolf suffered from mental illness and alternated between living in London and her country home in Richmond. She took her own life in 1941.

Woolf wrote “The Mark on the Wall” at the height of the first World War. The war touched the lives of English citizens, as Germany began strategically bombing England in 1915, and England began conscripting citizens to be soldiers in January of 1916 with the Military Service Bill. Woolf depicts the influence of the war on private citizens in this story, as her references to the war consistently interrupt her narrator’s trains of thought. Additionally, the early 20th century showed drastic changes in social norms, technological development, and the confluence of citizens in urban areas (which had begun with the industrial revolution). Movements for women’s rights, which played a central role in Woolf’s work, saw great gains at the time, as women’s suffrage was introduced in 1918 (just one year after the story’s initial publication).

Other modernist works treating the topic of time, loss, and memory include Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Woolf’s later novels, such as To the Lighthouse, where she develops these themes more fully. One could turn to “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for another short story written from the female perspective and exploring restrictive gender roles and the influence of domestic space and objects on the female psyche. Kate Chopin also published several short stories and novels investigating the female experience at the turn of the century, including “The Story of an Hour,” whose treatment of time and transportation technology resonates with themes explored in “The Mark on the Wall.”