The Shooting Party

This short story written by Virginia Woolf is a devastating and at times almost exaggerated critique of upper class society. The house and its occupants are ageing and falling apart. The slaughter of the pheasants is an apt metaphor for the privilege and waste of a landowning class which has outlived its purpose in society. And the mindless brutality of the Squire is a comic parody of the military tradition of which he is part.