Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)

• Born in London, the third child of Sir Leslie Stephen, a Victorian critic

and philosopher.

• She was educated at home.

• The deaths of her parents caused her two

long periods of deep depression.

• In 1913, she attempted suicide by

taking drugs.

Early Life

• After her father’s death, the family moved to Bloomsbury.

• Their house became the centre for important literary, artistic and

philosophical meetings and discussions by a group of writers:

Clive Bell, an art philosopher;

Leonard Woolf, a novelist and journalist. He marries Virginia in 1912

and founded with her the Hogarth press;

Edward Morgan Forster, a novelist;

John Maynard Keynes, an economist;

Roger Fry, an art critic.

The Bloomsbury Group

• She became increasingly subject to crises of anxiety and insecurity.

• World War II precipitated the situation.

• She drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex on 28 March 1941.

Last Years

• The Voyage Out (1915)

• Night and Day (1919)

• Jacob’s Room (1922)

stream of consciousness technique

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• To the Lighthouse (1927)

• Orlando (1928)

• The Waves (1931)

A Leading Modernist

It reflects Woolf’s modernist ideas of plot, character and language.

She prefers short, meaningful units of time: one day, two different

days,…

These units expanded almost beyond limits by what goes on within the

characters’ mind

Modern Fiction (1919)

time of the clock time of the mind

Woolf’s Use of Time

• She worked as a volunteer in the women’s suffrage movement.

• Some of her works deal with female emancipation.

• A Room of One’s Own (1929)

• Three Guineas (1938)

• The Common Reader (1925 and 1932)

• A Writer’s Diary (1915-41)

Feminist Writing and Critical Works

• Woolf rejects the traditional eventful plot.

• Her attention is turned to describing the working of her characters’

minds interior monologues.

• The novel is set in London, in the Bond Street area.

• Time unit one day.

• What goes on the characters’ minds overlaps with what goes on

outside, in the world of external reality.

Mrs Dalloway

• Clarissa, the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Member of Parliament,

spends the day preparing for the party she is giving that evening at

her house in Westminster.

• She has also invited Peter Walsh, with whom she was in love when

she was young, and who has just come back from India

• While the party is taking place, Septimius Warren Smith, who has

come back from World War I in a state of shock, commits suicide

somewhere else in London.

• The news is brought to the party by Septimius’ psychiatrist.

The Story

• Clarissa si struck by the news

• She does not know that Septimius and she had shared a moment in

their lives they had seen an airplane flying overhead in the

London sky

• Peter Walsh is moved and troubled by Clarissa’s approach

• The novel does not tell what happens next

The Story

• A fine London morning.

• Clarissa goes out to buy some flowers:

she plunges into the life of the city

sights, sounds, people filtered through her mind;

past and present and moral impressions run

through her mind;

stream of consciousness.

She loved life, London, …