“Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me." Virginia Woolf, “Walter Sickert”

Claire Nicholson’s 2023 special edition of Virginia Woolf’s “Blue & Green,” presented as a contemporary artist’s book, revives Woolf’s early exploration of colour as a field of affective intensity and temporality. In this short story, Woolf shows how colours shape perceptions of memory and time, creating an affective atmosphere through language much like painters do with a brush. According to Brian Massumi, affect is “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another” (Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus xvii). In Woolf’s writing, colour moves through perception, creating an affective atmosphere before settling into emotion or meaning.

This limited-edition book commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. It presents “Blue & Green” as both a visual and material work through its emphasis on the sensory aspects of reading and the emotional impact of colour. This emphasis highlights what the short story itself achieves. In “ Blue & Green,” Woolf integrates her ongoing interest in colour within a concise narrative. The story was published by the Hogarth Press in Woolf’s collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921. It was not reprinted during her lifetime and did not appear again until it was included in A Haunted House in 1944. In this short story, which has received comparatively little critical attention, Woolf begins to use colour deliberately to organize perception and guide the prose rather than as mere description. Colour directs attention and shapes the reader’s experience. For this reason, the 2023 limited edition is significant for renewing focus on Woolf’s early experiment with colour and making its formal qualities more apparent. This experiment reflects Woolf’s sustained engagement with colour in her own life, while the role of colour in “Blue & Green” is closely linked to her memory and perception.

Colour plays a structuring role in Woolf’s inner life and imaginative perception. In her autobiographical writing, Woolf anchors memory in sensory intensity, where colour condenses experience and allows it to persist as an affective atmosphere over time. In Moments of Being, her recollections condense into colour, sound, and patterned sensory impressions. Such impressions persist because of their intensity, returning as vivid traces in her perception. In this way, colour shapes atmosphere and allows experience to remain present within her memory. This is evident in her earliest memories, which are revived through colour. For instance, she recalls “red and purple flowers on a black ground” (Moments of Being 103). She remembers her childhood primarily through chromatic contrast rather than through narrative detail. Colour endures as perception, while the event itself tends to fade. Years later, she still sees “purple and red and blue… against the black” (103). Thus, colours continue to shape and unify the memory, allowing the experience to re-enter the present and remain open to change. In Moments of Being, Woolf writes that “all these colour-and-sound memories hang together” (105) and that “Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions” (105). In her early memories, sensory impressions combine. Colour and sound work together, creating layered perception. These moments retain their power as their intensity persists. Woolf observes that “Those moments… can still be more real than the present moment” (105). The past remains vivid within the present. This account of memory recalls Henry Bergson’s durée. As Bergson writes in Creative Evolution, “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances” (Bergson 5). In Woolf’s memories, colour gives this continuity perceptible form. It becomes an affective medium carrying feeling across time and bringing childhood experience into the present.

Colour also shows its agency in Woolf’s daily life. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West, she writes, “I am lying under a blue and purple forest” (Woolf, Letters 423). Her perception is immersed in a tonal environment, creating atmosphere, enveloping her body, and shaping her spatial awareness. Her diaries show that colour can also influence the mood through which the scene is experienced. Describing a walk, she notes “the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness” (Woolf, Diary 246). Here, colour soothes her mind and creates a sense of calm. As the visible field slowly shifts, her body adjusts, and her mood responds to these subtle sensory changes.

Moreover, in “Kew Gardens,”Woolf recalls green and blue, as people move through “layer after layer of green blue vapour.” Their bodies, once “with substance and a dash of colour,” gradually dissolve into a “green-blue atmosphere” (38). In her essays, she writes more directly about the physical and emotional effects of colour on the body. For instance, in “Street Haunting”, she writes, “the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth” (12). While the eye is drawn to colour and warmth, sensation accompanies sight. In “Pictures,” Woolf gives its bodily affect more directly: “We nestle into its colour, feed and fill ourselves with yellow and red and gold till we drop off, nourished and content” (86). She describes colour as something the body requires. Similarly, in “Walter Sickert,” Woolf writes: “Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns… Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me” (242). The somatic affect of colour is explained through verbs that mark its changing effects, such as warming, thrilling, chafing, burning, soothing, and exhausting. In the same essay, we can also see how she was influenced by the Post-Impressionist transformation of painting in the early twentieth century. Roger Fry’s 1910 and 1912 London exhibitions introduced new ideas about colour to English art. Perspective flattened, tonal contrasts intensified, and form relied less on naturalistic shading. Grass was not always green, nor sky always blue. Colour reorganized space and atmosphere, so the canvas became a reconstruction shaped by chromatic relationships rather than a direct copy of reality.These developments reshape how reality is understood, as colour participates in perception, memory, and feeling rather than simply recording what is seen. Woolf’s prose engages with these questions. In “Walter Sickert,” Woolf reflects on the variability of perception, noting “how different people see colour differently,” before extending this idea through the figure of the insect, describing creatures “in whom the eye is so developed that they are all eye,” moving between colours and momentarily becoming what they see. She also recalls her own experience at Sickert’s exhibition: “I became completely and solely an insect—all eye. I flew from colour to colour…” This moment foregrounds affect as an immediate, bodily response, where colour is not passively observed but actively felt, producing shifting intensities that differ from one perceiver to another. In this sense, perception operates not as a stable cognitive act but as a field of intensities, aligning with Brian Massumi’s claim that “the immediacy of visceral perception is so radical that it can be said without exaggeration to precede exteroceptive sense perception” (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual 65). In other words, in this instance perception first emerges through colour as a bodily intensity, before it becomes a recognizable image or a meaningful experience. In addition, as her painter contemporaries within the Bloomsbury Group, including her sister Vanessa Bell, reimagined visual realism through colour, Woolf explores whether writing can similarly reorganize perception. This influence also appears in her correspondence, where she writes to Bell: “Your colour intrigues me, seduces me, and satisfies me exquisitely” (Woolf, Letters 341). As painters reorganize visual experience through colour, Woolf considers how writing can operate in a similar way.

When we turn to “Blue & Green,” she uses colour as a means of structuring perception rather than simply describing the world through these two colours. Green and blue move and spread across the scene, gathering and closing around forms. Through this movement, they establish rhythm and atmosphere, determining the conditions through which experience is perceived. Woolf gives colour a narrative agency. Green and blue act almost as characters, shaping the development of the scene. The story consists of two brief sections, “Green” and “Blue,” yet within this minimal structure Virginia Woolf constructs a complex model of perception shaped through colour. From the opening sentence, “The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green,” colour appears not as a descriptive detail but as an event. Green gathers and spreads across surfaces, shifting over marble, sand, palm leaves, and feathers. The prose follows this movement closely, as images arrive in quick succession and produce a sense of continuous motion. Perception forms through this flow before any stable meaning emerges. Green, in this sense, shapes experience at the level of sensation before it becomes an object of interpretation. When “Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece,” colour begins to register temporal change. The verb “sweeps” introduces both direction and duration, extending the moment and giving it a temporal thickness. The phrase “The green’s out” then condenses this process into a brief tonal shift. Time is not narrated through external markers but is sensed through changes in colour. Duration is experienced chromatically.

In the “Blue” section, blue alters the scale and structure of the scene. The setting expands into sea and sky, and this spatial widening is reflected in the rhythm of the prose. Sentences become longer and more measured, allowing perception to develop at a slower pace. Blue gains depth as it accumulates across the scene, thickening the perceptual field, and when “the blue closes over him,” colour engulfs him. Green moves across surfaces, while blue surrounds and contains, creating a sense of enclosure. Through this contrast, Woolf modulates both the speed of perception and the depth of experience. At the level of grammar, colour shifts between object, subject, and agent. It is something seen, something that acts, and something that structures the sentence. Repetition and variation allow colour to circulate across the text, building atmosphere through syntax and generating affective intensities. These intensities, emerging at the level of perception, take shape through relational movement and patterned variation. In this sense, Sara Ahmed’s claim that “the objects of emotion take shape as effects of circulation” (8) clarifies how colour and feeling emerge together through repetition and relational movement. As Ahmed also notes, “shared feelings are at stake, and seem to surround us, like a thickness in the air, or an atmosphere” (10). Atmosphere here emerges through this movement in language, shaping perception over time. Colour, in this sense, structures not only what is seen but how it is experienced over time. It structures relationships between body and environment, perception and memory, and the immediate and the lasting.

Ultimately, Claire Nicholson’s special edition highlights the importance of colour in Woolf’s writing and extends this focus into material form. By printing “Green” in green and “Blue” in blue, and organizing the page around colour and white space, the book makes perception part of the reading experience. Colour operates both within language and at the level of the page. In this way, Woolf’s experiment with colour as a generator of affect continues beyond the prose, reactivated in the contemporary artist’s book.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell, Dover Publications, 1998.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. “Blue & Green.” Monday or Tuesday, Hogarth Press, 1921.

—. “Kew Gardens.” A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, Hogarth Press, 1943, pp. 32–40.

—. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” Street Haunting and Other Essays, Vintage, 2015.

—. “Pictures.” The Moment and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, 1947.

—. “Walter Sickert.” The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf, vol. 2, Hogarth Press, 1967.

—. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

—. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 2, Hogarth Press, 1978.

—. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3, Hogarth Press, 1977.