In this background, the life story and influences that shaped the author's style are

discussed in detail. Born on January 25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a
remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian, an author and one of
the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia
Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for
several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession.
Both of her parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. Woolf had
three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura
Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight children lived
under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Two of Woolf’s brothers had been educated at Cambridge, but all the sisters were
taught at home and utilized the splendid confines of the family’s lush Victorian library.
Moreover, Woolf’s parents were extremely well connected, both socially and artistically.
Her father is a friend to William Thackeray, the father of his first wife who died
unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other noted thinkers. Her mother’s
aunt was the famous 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

From the time of her birth until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach
town at the very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House,
which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and has a view of
the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later memoirs, Woolf recalled
St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she incorporated scenes from those early summers
into her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).

As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family
newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, to document her family’s humorous anecdotes.
However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being sexually abused by her
half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which she wrote about in her essays A Sketch
of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate. In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with the
sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her first mental breakdown,

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and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had become the head of the household, two years
later.

While dealing with her personal losses, Woolf continued her studies in German,
Greek and Latin at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College, London. Her four years of
study introduced her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In
1904, her father died from stomach cancer, which contributed to another emotional setback
that led to Woolf being institutionalized for a brief period. Virginia Woolf’s dance between
literary expression and personal desolation would continue for the rest of her life. In 1905,
she began writing professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement. A
year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a family trip to
Greece.

After their father's death, Woolf's sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family
home in Hyde Park Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. During
this period, Virginia met several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals
and artists including the art critic Clive Bell, who married Virginia's sister Vanessa, the
novelist E.M. Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, economist
John Maynard Keynes and essayist Leonard Woolf, among others. The group became
famous in 1910 for the Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group
dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded
man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the
HMS Dreadnought. After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf and Virginia became closer,
and eventually they were married on August 10, 1912. The two shared a passionate love for
one another for the rest of their lives.

Several years before marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first
novel. The original title was Melymbrosia. After nine years and innumerable drafts, it was
released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Woolf used the book to experiment with several
literary tools, including compelling and unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states and
free association prose. Two years later, the Woolfs bought a used printing press and
established Hogarth Press, their own publishing house operated out of their home, Hogarth

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House. Virginia and Leonard published some of their writing, as well as the work of
Sigmund Freud, Katharine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot.

A year after the end of World War I, the Woolfs purchased Monk's House, a cottage
in the village of Rodmell in 1919, and that same year Virginia published Night and Day, a
novel set in Edwardian England. Her third novel Jacob's Room was published by Hogarth in
1922. Based on her brother Thoby, it was considered a significant departure from her earlier
novels with its modernist elements. That year, she met author, poet and landscape gardener
Vita Sackville-West, the wife of English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita began
a friendship that developed into a romantic affair. Although their affair eventually ended,
they remained friends until Virginia Woolf's death.

In 1925, Woolf received rave reviews for Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel. The
mesmerizing story interweaved interior monologues and raised issues of feminism, mental
illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England. Mrs. Dalloway was adapted into a
1997 film, starring Vanessa Redgrave, and inspired The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael
Cunningham and a 2002 film adaptation. Her 1928 novel, To the Lighthouse, was another
critical success and considered revolutionary for its stream of consciousness storytelling.
The modernist classic examines the subtext of human relationships through the lives of the
Ramsay family as they vacation on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Woolf found a literary muse in Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf's 1928 novel
Orlando, which follows an English nobleman who mysteriously becomes a woman at the
age of 30 and lives on for over three centuries of English history. The novel was a
breakthrough for Woolf who received critical praise for the groundbreaking work, as well as
a newfound level of popularity.

In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One's Own, a feminist essay based on lectures
she had given at women's colleges, in which she examines women's role in literature. In the
work, she sets forth the idea that "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she
is to write fiction." Woolf pushed narrative boundaries in her next work, The Waves (1931),
which she described as "a play-poem" written in the voices of six different characters.
Woolf published The Years, the final novel published in her lifetime in 1937, about a

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family's history over the course of a generation. The following year she published Three
Guineas, an essay which continued the feminist themes of A Room of One's Own and
addressed fascism and war.

Throughout her career, Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned
dramatic letters, wrote moving essays and self-published a long list of short stories. By her
mid-forties, she had established herself as an intellectual, an innovative and influential
writer and pioneering feminist. Her ability to balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense
plot lines earned her incredible respect from peers and the public alike. Despite her outward
success, she continued to regularly suffer from debilitating bouts of depression and dramatic
mood swings.

Woolf's husband, Leonard, always by her side, was quite aware of any signs that
pointed to his wife’s descent into depression. He saw, as she was working on what would be
her final manuscript, Between the Acts (published posthumously in 1941), that she was
sinking into deepening despair. At the time, World War II was raging on and the couple
decided if England was invaded by Germany, they would commit suicide together, fearing
that Leonard, who was Jewish, would be in particular danger. In 1940, the couple’s London
home was destroyed during the Blitz, the Germans bombing of the city.

Unable to cope with her despair, Woolf pulled on her overcoat, filled its pockets with
stones and walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. As she waded into the water, the
stream took her with it. The authorities found her body three weeks later. Leonard Woolf
had her cremated and her remains were scattered at their home, Monk's House.

Although her popularity decreased after World War II, Woolf's work resonated again
with a new generation of readers during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Woolf remains
one of the most influential authors of the 21st century.

The novel, which examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class
Londoner married to a member of Parliament, is essentially plotless; what action there is
takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. The novel addresses the nature of time
in personal experience through two interwoven stories, that of Mrs. Dalloway, preparing for

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a party, and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. While never
abandoning her omniscient third-person voice, Woolf enters the consciousness of seemingly
unconnected characters and brings their feelings to the surface. The characters are
connected, and the narrative shifts from one to another, by means of shared public
experiences, such as an exhibition of skywriting.

The novel takes place over the course of a single day, and is one of the defining texts
of modernist London. It traces the interlocking movements around Regent’s Park of the two
main protagonists: Clarissa Dalloway is a socialite, and wife of Richard Dalloway, a
Conservative MP, while Septimus Warren Smith is a veteran and shell-shocked victim of
the First World War. The passage of time in the novel, punctuated by the periodic striking
of a giant, phallic Big Ben, ultimately takes us to a double climax; to the success of Mrs.
Dalloway’s illustrious party, and to the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, who finds
himself unable to live in the post-war city.

Much of the effect of this novel derives from the irreconcilability of its two halves,
an irreconcilability that is reflected in the space of the city itself. Different people go about
their different lives, preparing for suicide and preparing for dinner, and there is no way, the
novel suggests, of building a bridge between them. Septimus and Clarissa are separated by
class, by gender, and by geography, but at the same time, the novel’s capacity to move from
one consciousness to another suggests a kind of intimate, underground connection between
them, which is borne out in Clarissa’s response to the news of Septimus’s death. A poetic
space, which does not correspond to the clock time meted out by Big Ben, underlies the city,
suggesting a new way of thinking about relations between men and women, between one
person and another. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of contradictions-between men and women,
between rich and poor, between self and other, between life and death. But despite these
contradictions, in the flimsy possibility of a poetic union between Septimus and Clarissa, the
novel points toward a reconciliation we are still waiting to realize.

Before Mrs. Dalloway becomes a complete novel, it is apparent for Virginia Woolf
that it is a perfect example of the flow of internal thoughts that make the stream of
consciousness what it is as a technique. In her book A Writer's Diary (1922) she says:

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 Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of
insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side--
something like that. Septimus Smith? Is that a good name? (Woolf, p. 53)

The novel is titled The Hours before it becomes Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf has a
vision of what it is like. Woolf writes a continuous line of ideas for every story that she
includes in her book. These streams later merge together to become a coherent narrative. In
A Writer's Diary (1922) she says:

I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The
Hours [which becomes Mrs. Dalloway], and my discovery: how I dig out
beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want;
humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each
come to daylight at the present moment. (Woolf, p. 59)

A writer's imagination must be full to the brim with ideas in order to write a book
using the technique of stream of consciousness. Virginia Woolf's rich and vivid imagination
helps her in the process of writing Mrs. Dalloway. To this extent she says in A Writer's
Diary (1922):

I am stuffed with ideas for it. I feel I can use up everything I've ever thought.
Certainly, I'm less coerced than I've yet been. The doubtful point is, I think,
the character of Mrs. Dalloway. It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinselly.
But then I can bring innumerable other characters to her support. I wrote the
100th page today. Of course, I've only been feeling my way into it--up fill last
August anyhow. It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my
tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of
it. This is my prime discovery so far. (Woolf, p. 60)

Virginia Woolf's plan is to write a comprehensive work of art that includes her views
on a large number of issues. She intends to do that with moment-to-moment writing without
giving any attention to the structure of the plot or the characters. She is dissociated from the
reality that other writers portray in their well-executed works of fiction. Using the stream of

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consciousness technique, it seems that the entire novel is about the interior dialogue that is
inside the writer's mind rather than the characters' minds. Woolf's own comment in A
Writer's Diary (1922) is this:

I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social
system, and to show it at work at its most intense... Am I writing The Hours
from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my
mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. It's
a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett say I can't
create, or didn't in Jacob's Room, characters that survive. My answer is--but I
leave that to the Nation; it's only the old argument that character is dissipated
into shreds now; the old post-Dostoyevsky argument. I daresay it's true,
however, that I haven't that "reality" gift. I insubstantise, willfully to some
extent, distrusting reality--its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power
of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? (Woolf, p.
56)

From the beginning of the novel we are introduced to the main character as an
indication that all the events that will come to pass are related to her own life. Woolf says in
Mrs. Dalloway (p. 1) "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The author
then writes "And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to
children on a beach." This gives the reader an idea about the nature of the events of the
novel. Clarissa starts her day in the morning and goes around the streets of London to do
what's on her schedule. On the same page, Woolf writes:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a
little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how
calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap
of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as
she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window,
that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees

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 with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and
looking until Peter Walsh said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’—was that
it?—‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’—was that it? He must have said it at
breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace --Peter Walsh.
He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot
which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;
his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of
things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this
about cabbages. (Woolf p. 1)

It is clear to the reader from the vivid language and the continuous new ideas that
seem to appear in the character's mind that she is expressing every thought that comes to her
mind in an uninterrupted flow that doesn't seem to have a definite end. Clarissa's emotions
seem to be positive; she is positive, cheerful, free, and in a very excellent mood.

Another story line that is parallel to Clarissa's is one where we meet Septimus Warren
Smith for the first time. He is a shell-shocked world war veteran who's apprehensive and
nervous. Septimus' emotion seem to be the opposite of Clarissa's. Perhaps what's special
about him is that he and Clarissa never meet in the novel. Woolf writes about him on the
first occasion he is mentioned and says:

Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing
brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of
apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The
world has raised its whip; where will it descend? (Woolf p. 11)

Shortly after we are introduced to the unstable Septimus Warren Smith, he is faced
with a simple situation that seems to have the greatest effect on his mind. Septimus' trauma
that he suffered during the war made him irritable, paranoid, fearful, and resentful. To
express this idea, Woolf writes a paragraph with the technique of the stream of
consciousness that seems dark and full of negative emotions such as horror and
apprehension. The author says:

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 Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded
like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became
extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s
shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols;
here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway,
coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her
little pink face pursed in enquiry. Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus
looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the
motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a
tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to
one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface
and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and
quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way,
he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted
there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose? (Woolf p.
11)

The events of the novel progress to no specific end concerning Clarissa's story line.
The only conclusion to her story is perhaps the success of her illustrious party for which she
prepares from the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, Septimus Warren Smith meets
a horrific fate. He commits suicide because he is unable to endure the pain from which he
suffers in his post-war life. If the reader follows both story lines, a clear distinction and
contrast can be noticed. One story line is cheerful, casual with only small changes and
twists. The other is ominous, stressful and somewhat terrifying. In these stories, Woolf
excellently projects her own inner thoughts and those of her characters. Despite being
different, both stories clearly reflect Virginia Woolf's talent and her mastery of the
technique of stream of consciousness.

Critic Dorothy Goldman says: "Modernist writing suggests a cultural crisis: language
awry, cultural cohesion lost, perception fragmented and multiplied."

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 Critic Alexandra Harris commented that the lack of cohesion for the reader relates to
Septimus' mind where "a busy street becomes a nightmarish vision of the trenches and
where there were men trapped in mines". The researcher supports this point of view because
it was apparent from the first occasion on which Septimus is introduced.

Critic Bernard Blackstone says: "Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment with time. It is a

mingling of present experience and memory." This view is accurate since the time-line of
the novel is one day long, but as a narrative it seems much longer and deeper.

Critic Elizabeth Abel thinks that "rather than influence, Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates
the common literary prefiguration of psychoanalytic doctrine, which can retroactively
articulate patterns implicit in the literary text".

Critic Sigrid Nunez says: "Mrs. Dalloway represents Woolf’s fullest self-portrait as
an artist; it contemplates the relationship between her own madness and her creativity." This
opinion is not necessarily accurate. A work of art has to be, in a way, a representation of the
author's mind. However, the fiction in the novel could be the daydreaming of a vivid
imagination rather than the reflection of the author's personality.

Critic Phyllis Rose says: "Mrs. Dalloway is the first novel in which she taps
unabashedly the great reservoir of feminine experience."

Critic H. Lee Argues that "there is a continual interplay between her sense of reaching
out to others and withdrawing from them; between her sense of failure, loss and coldness,
and her involvement with the vivid, energetic pulse of life".

Critic T.E. Apter says: "Septimus Smith is the perfect victim: his sensitivity to the
pain in the world makes him intolerable to those who do not wish to see the pain; the
individuality of his vision makes him unable to survive in a world that demands crafty self-
defence and shallow self-assurance."

Critic Rachel Bowlby thinks that by marrying Richard she gave up passion, but kept
her independence. She hid her emotions and, because of that, the pain inflicted by her
choice till torments her today: "Clarissa is both perfectly conventional in her role as a lady

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and hostess and, at the same time, a misfit: Mrs. Dalloway is all about the fact that she is
still unresolved in a choice apparently completed a generation before".

Critic Nancy Taylor suggests that "Woolf tries to create an androgynous ideal by
letting the language of Clarissa and Septimus change between prose and poetry, two forms
that are thought to be examples of masculine and feminine writing respectively".

Critic J. Hillis Miller points to "the same images of unity, reconciliation, of

communion [that] well up so spontaneously from the deep levels of the minds of all the
major characters".

Critic Elizabeth Abel says: "Clarissa occupies a role that changes when she leaves
Bourton. From a secure, feminine environment, where she could experience homosexual
feelings, she went into a male world where only heterosexuality was accepted and other
sexual feelings had to be repressed. She describes this as 'an emotionally pre-Oedipal
female-centred natural world' in contrast to 'the heterosexual male-dominated social world.'"

Critic Barbara Hill Rigney Claims that "Clarissa and Septimus are both 'feminine'
characters because they are both victimized by a 'male-supremacist system.' "

Critic Deborah Parsons says: "The narrator reports the speech or thought of a
character 'while moving inside the character’s consciousness to take on the style and tone of
their own immediate speaking voice.' "

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Conclusion

In the end, it was shown that Mrs. Dalloway as a modern work of fiction is a novel
uses the stream of consciousness perhaps in the best way possible. Not only does it convey
the author's thoughts and inner feelings, but it also delivers the emotions and conscious
experience of the characters in a striking manner. Virginia Woolf moves from her own mind
to the minds of the characters with remarkable ease. The transition is almost unnoticeable.
As readers, we are not always aware of where her own conscious experience ends and that
of the character begins.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that marks the beginning of a new narrative mode in English
fiction. The story may not have a well-constructed plot, but it does deliver a powerful
literary vision from a talented writer. Virginia Woolf's own controversial opinion may be
that plots are not a necessary component of fiction in the modern age, but her novel
nonetheless seems to be an excellent one. It could be said that her inability to construct a
plot is a shortcoming of some sort, but that is characteristic of the age in which she lived.

When viewing Virginia Woolf as a writer, it is clear that her tendency to use the
stream of consciousness stems from something deeper than her alleged lack of ability.
Woolf is undoubtedly talented, but the lack of a plot in her works is due to her own
personality. Her past was a traumatic one. It is a past that left her personality broken and her
mind unorganized. She, however, uses her unstable nature to produce a powerful work of art
that is a perfect reflection of herself as a human being. Mrs. Dalloway is a deep and thought
provoking work of art that has significant insights into the mind of the modern man. The
modern man who is "a heap of broken images" as T. S. Eliot famously says in his poem,
The Waste Land. The novel at hand is a perfect representation of this description.

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 Bibliography

Primary Source:

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House,

Inc., 1993. Print.

Secondary Sources:

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. London: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Print.
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary. California: Harcourt, 2003. Print.

Secondary On-line Sources:

https://www.biography.com/people/virginia-woolf-9536773

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mrs-Dalloway-novel-by-Woolf

http://www.cram.com/flashcards/mrs-dalloway-critics-5622060

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