Virginia Woolf:
1882 Virginia was born in London by an highly-intellectual family.
1895 When Virginia was thirteen, the death of her mother and two years later of her step sister,
caused a nervous breakdown.
1904 she founded a circle of intellectuals which would become known as the Bloomsbury Group,
where she met her future husband.
1941 she drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex.
Rather than the linearity of traditional realist novel, she is particularly interested in the impression of
the characters who experience these events, in their subjectivity. She focused mainly on female
subjectivity, which made her a heroine to many feminist.
Time is dilated because she include long indirect interior monologue, which are used in order to
rapprese the gap between chronological and interior time.
In her indirect monologues there is still the occasional presence of a narrator who, however
invisible, give some order to the character’s thoughts by arranging them in logical and grammatical
sequence.
In the writer’s opinion life is a luminous halo surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end, so the “moment of being” is a moment of intensity, perception or vision which illuminate
our lives.
Mrs. Dalloway
The story is limited to the events of a single day in central London. It begins with Clarissa, the 51year-
old wife of a politician, leaves home to buy flowers for the party she has organised for evening.
During the day, Clarissa is captured in her many changing moods and memories. We also see her
through the eyes of other characters like the man she loved Peter Walsh and her old friend Sally
Seton.
Her day are contrasted with that of Septimus Smith, a disturbed, shell-shocked war veteran, who has
been treated for his nervous disorders by two doctors that didn’t found anything to help him.
At the end of the day he commits suicide by jumping out of the window.
Learning about this tragic event, Clarissa reflects on how necessary it is for her the Septimus’s death
because as he embraces death, she at last can fully embraces life. The novel ends at the party whit
Clarissa going to Peter in all her enigmatic vitally.
-interior time in contrast with chronological time: Clarissa is walking in London and her journey is
interrupted by a lot of interior time, she think about her memories and the uncertain terrain of
the future. Clarissa's physical impression of the city are interwoven with her mental associations
and reveries, when her interior time is interrupted by the chimes of Big Ben.
-The character of Clarissa and Septimus become Mutually dependent, although they are never
directly connected; because the Septimus’s choice to die is inseparable from her acceptance of
life, and his death becomes the halo that illuminates her life.
