Virginia Woolf
1. Life
She was born in London in 1882. She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere with
free access to her father’s library. She spent her summers at St Ives, a seaside town in
Cornwall, and the sea remained a central symbol in her art. The death of her mother when
she was 13 led her to depression. In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and together with her
sister Vanessa, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group: the avant-garde of early
20th-century London. There she developed the stream of consciousness style.
In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and In 1915 she started her literary career as a talented
novelist and critic.
The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. so she put rocks into her pockets
and drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
2. Literary career
● Mrs Dalloway (1925): Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton’s relationship as
young women.
● Orlando (1928); Deals with androgyny.
3. A modernist writer
• Her main aim was to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory;
• In her novels the omniscient narrator disappears
• the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of
ideas, presented as a continuous flux.
5. Mrs Dalloway PLOT
The novel takes place over one day in june 1922
in London. It presents the interwoven stories
of Clarissa Dalloway and the shell shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. At 10 a.m.
Clarissa goes to buy flowers for a party she is giving that evening.
While Clarissa is in the flower shop a car makes an explosive noise and a plane writes in the
sky. Septimus and his wife Lucrezia are
walking in the street. Septimus's mental disorder has necessitated the calling of Sir William
Bradshaw, a famous nerve specialist who advises him to go to a psychiatric hospital, but at 6
p.m. he throws himself out of the window of his room.The narration shifts to Clarissa's party,
where news of Septimus's suicide is discussed by the guests and Clarissa thinks of how
vulnerable Septimus might have felt and understands his uncompromising choice, feeling
ashamed about her own compromises.
setting
Is a small area of London five years after World War I, when George V was on the throne
and the society was changing. The modern technology of cars and airplanes represents a
London rushing towards modernity. Life expresses itself in moments of vision which are at
the same time objective (the clocks, the streets, the cars, the flowers) and yet subjectively
creative, since they are recreated every moment by active consciousness.
The tunnelling technique
Woolf digs into the characters’ past creating tunnels. Through these tunnels they connect at
specific moments in the narrative. This gives an idea of their personal history and unites
them even though they never meet.
