This book aims at a unique synthetic appraisal and revaluation of Virginia Woolf's short stories. Confronting the author's essays on the short story with her practice, it shows how Woolf rejuvenates the genre of the short story and redefines it as a new form of conversation: a paradoxical and dynamic space, a space of encounter between the self and the other, a locus of emotion and a site of resistance against all forms of political and literary totality. This throws a new light on Woolf's short stories as foregrounding the ethical - a field hardly charted in studies of Woolf's short stories - as well as its intertwining with the political and the aesthetic. Set within the author's whole work which is seen as an open space favouring circulation, Woolf's short stories, far from being marginal and merely experimental, emerge as participating fully in Woolf's creative process and aesthetic quest.