Virginia WOOLF (London 1882 - drowned herself 1941)
Life and works
Her highly intellectual family environment had a great influence on her approach to writing and art
After the death of her parents, she moved to Bloomsbury, in 1904, where she founded a circle of intellectuals
“Bloomsbury Group”.
In 1915 she published her first novel, The Voyage Out and she attempted suicide.
In 1917 she and her husband founded the Hogarth Press.
The publication on Night and Day in 1919 was followed by a string of Modernist masterpieces:
1925 – Mrs Dalloway
1927 – To the Lighthouse
1928 – Orlando
1931 – The Waves
1941 – Between the Acts
She was also a brilliant essayist and critic: her most acute critical work is collected in:
1925 – 32 The Common Reader
1929 – A Room of One’s Own
Mrs Dalloway
The plot
The action of Mrs Dalloway is limited to the events of a single day in central London.
It opens on a June morning as Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a politician, leaves home to buy flowers for the party she
has organised.
She is captured in her many changing moods and memories and we also see her through the eyes and thoughts of
other characters.
Her day is contrasted with that of Septimus Smith, a disturbed war veteran who has been treated for his nervous
disorders, by doctor Holmes and the insensitive nerve specialist, Bradshaw.
At the end of the day he commits suicide by jumping out of the window of his room.
News of his death intrudes upon Clarissa’s party, who reflects on how necessary it is for her that Septimus dies
because as he embraces death, she can embrace life.
The novel ends at the party with Clarissa appearing to Peter, who had been looking for her, in all her enigmatic vitality.
Features and themes
Woolf represent the gap between chronological and interior time, using the technique of indirect interior monologue:
time is often dilated and a single moment can last for a very long time.
She interested in the impressions and in the subjectivity of the characters.
Dalloway’s interior monologue is constructed with a bravura that marks a new phase in the development of the
English novel; the beginning of the novel is an example of the way she portrays interior time in contrast with
chronological time.
One of her aims, was to “dig caves behind her characters”: Clarissa’s impressions are interwoven with her mental
associations, while the interior time is interrupted by Big Ben.
Another aspect is that Clarissa and Septimus become mutually dependent although they are never directly connected
apart from the party scene.
Like Clarissa, the chaos of Septimus’ mind merges with his walking around London, but he can’t hold all the threads of
experience and sensations that invade his mind togheter.
His choosing to die is inseparable from her acceptance of life, and his death illuminates her life.