The article focuses on Virginia Woolf ’s short story “The Widow and the Parrot,” the first of her two children’s stories. It was written between 1922 and 1923 a year before Woolf ’s second famous children’s story “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”. The article describes the history of the creation of the story, written and illustrated by Woolf at the request of his nephews Juliana and Quentin Bell for the family magazine “Charleston Bulletin”. “The Widow and the Parrot” is framed within the three contexts, which allow us to reveal its poetics and problematics. The first context is the family tradition of the house press, “The Hyde Park Gate News” of little Virginia and Vanessa, and “Charleston Bulletin” of the Bell brothers, which connected Stephens and Bells through time. The second context is Woolf ’s involvement in supporting the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a public debate surrounding the passage of “The Plumage Bill” which prohibited the export bird’s feathers and Woolf ’s essay of the same name. The third context is the history of British children’s literature which by the early 1920s had number of traditions, including a writer’s collaboration with a specific child, a boy or a girl as an inspiration, muse, or a close friend. We come to the conclusion that “The Widow and the Parrot,” written in the form of a classic Victorian children’s story, is at the same time an ironic reflection on the 19th century children’s literature as well as an important modernist statement for Woolf.
Ключевые слова: Вирджиния Вулф, «Вдова и попугай», детская литература, модернизм, птица.