In Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf takes advantage of the liminal quality of the short story to highlight the suspended world she creates in the garden. For Woolf, the lyric short story's subversion of traditional narrative structure allowed her to focus on world-building rather than plot. Furthermore, the short story creates a liminal space by the very nature of its form. Taken in a space where it is not considered a poem or a novel, the short story exists as indefinite. However, the liminality of the short story is both liberating and restrictive. Woolf explores this feature in order to suggest the unsustainable nature of Kew Gardens. While Woolf uses the short story form to create a liminal, impressionistic space that eradicates the boundaries between man and nature, she also uses the short story's transitory quality to suggest that such a space can only exist for a short duration due to the restrictions of the imposing outside world. Eileen Baldeshwiler's "The Lyric Short Story" discusses the two different branches of the short story: the "epic" and the "lyrical" (231). Baldeshwiler highlights the distinct functions of the forms by focusing on their stylistic differences. The epic short story, according to Baldeshwiler, relies heavily on "external action" that is "manufactured primarily to advance the plot, culminating in a climactic ending that sometimes offers a universal insight" (231). Additionally, the plot and characters are “expressed in the purposeful and unobtrusive language of prose realism” (Baldeshwiler 231). In other words, the characters, plot and general tone of the play adhere to reality. In opposition to this style, Baldeshwiler explains that the new lyric "focuses on...... middle of paper...... which suspends the boundaries of man and nature, the way in which it structures the last image to be unfriendly indicates the unsustainable nature of the garden. Woolf therefore takes advantage of the structure of the lyric short stories to create a liminal space that both breaks down barriers to form a unified, impressionistic world and to emphasize the imposing negative aspects of such a transitional structure. As a result, Woolf prompts the reader to question whether the liminal space created in the short story is positive in its ability to unite nature and humans or negative in its apparent unsustainability. Regardless, the form and structure of the short story are essential in Kew Gardens. Without the liminal space of the short story, one wonders whether Woolf could have succeeded in creating the unstable, yet peaceful, world of Kew Gardens..