VIRGINIA WOOLF.

Life.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the third child of Sir Leslie Stephen – a distinguished Victorian literary
critic and philosopher. Virginia was brought up in a household full of people and devoted to intellectual pursuits of all
kinds. While her brothers went to university, she was educated at home, reading widely in her father's vast library,
meeting many men of letters, and learning Greek. Virginia's youthful paradise was her parents' big house at St Ives,
Cornwall, where her family spent the summers. Virginia's passion for the sea entered much of her later fiction.
Early signs of mental instability.
Virginia's mother died in 1895, and this was followed by a long period of depression for Virginia. This was the first sign
of a nervous fragility that accompanied her throughout her all life, resulting in periodical fits of mental instability and
gloominess. Her father's death in 1904 produced another period of deep depression, and a further one in 1913 brought
about her first suicide attempt with drugs.
The he move to Bloomsbury.
After their father's death, the Stephens moved to Bloomsbury, an area of London near the British Museum. Their house
became a centre for important literary, artistic and philosophical meetings and discussions by a group of writers known as
the Bloomsbury Group. This included the Stephens themselves and the novelist and journalist Leonard Woolf, who in
1912 married Virginia and with her founded the Hogarth Press; The "Bloomsbury apostles", as they called themselves,
were decidedly anti-Victorian, unconventional in their ideas about life, society and art, sceptical about religion and
moderately left-wing in politics. They were a yery exclusive circle too, only made up of refined and highly cultured men
and women.
Latter years.
In her latter years Virginia Woolf was more and more subject to crises caused by anxiety and insecurity. World War II
precipitated the situation. Unable to face the terror and destruction that surrounded her, she drowned herself in the River
Ouse in Sussex on 28 March 1941.
A leading Modernist.
Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out had a conventional style. Virginia Woolf's mature work as a novelist begins
wit Jacob's Room (1922). It describes the life of a young man, Jacob Flanders, and his death in World War I. It was
written using the 'stream-of-consciousness' technique, with indirect narration and impressionistic poetic flow. Woolf's
subsequent novels all followed this model and made her one of the leading modernist novelists of her day and of the 20th
century.
Woolf's use of time.
Woolf's use of time in her novels reflects her modernist ideas of plot, character and language. Like Joyce, she prefers
short meaningiul time units. These short time units that relate external events are, expanded almost beyond limits by what
goes on within the characters' minds, which can cover years and range from past, present to future. This was described by
Woolf in her essay Modern Fiction (1919) as the difference between 'time of the clock (measurable time) and 'time of the
mind' (the way the mind is affected by it).
Feminist writing and critical works.
Throughout her life Virginia Woolf was interested in problems concerning the role of woman in society. As early as
1910 she was working as a volunteer in the movement of women's suffrage and later she wrote some of her most inspired
essays on the subject of female emancipation, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Apart from her
novels, Virginia Woolf wrote many short stories, critical, biographies, and several volumes of notebooks forming her
diary.
Mrs. Dalloway.
Set in London, this is the story of an ordinary day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway the wife of a member of Parliament.
Nothing extraordinary happens and the day's significance depends on two things: the characters' interior monologues,
which express their inner lives, and the way their lives cross without their even realising it, which shows the irony and the
mystery of individ destiny. In Mrs Dalloway, six lives are shown during one day in the Bond Street ar al London – similar
to the one day in the life of Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses. The novel is characterized by the way in which what goes on
within the characters' minds overlane with what goes on outside, in the world of external reality. Virginia Woolf rejcets
the traditional eventful plot. She makes great use of the interior monologue, and her sentences are often broken by dashes
and semicolons, to reproduce the incessant and irregular flux of thought as it builds up in the mind.
THE STORY.
The main character is Clarissa Dalloway- the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Member of Parliament– who spends the day
preparing for a party she is giving that evening at her house in Westminster. Among other fashionable guests, she has
invited Peter Walsh, with whom she was in love when she was young, and who has just returned from India and still loves
her. While the party is taking place, in a less fashionable part of London, Septimius Warren Smith- who has come back
from World War I in a state of shock- commits suicide. The news is brought to Clarissa's party by the psychiatrist whom
Septimius had consulted. Clarissa, for no particular reason, is struck by the news. She does not know that Septimius' life
and her own have both shared that same day some of the many events they have witnesse such as an airplane flying
overhead in the London sky. The novel ends with Peter Walsh moved and troubled by Clarissa's approach, though the
novel does not tell us what happens next.
She Loved Life, London, This Moment of June.
This is the beginning of Mrs Dalloway. The novel opens with one of Clarissa's monologues; it is the most important in the
whole book since it introduces us to the 'stream-of-consciousness' technique, and to the novel's main character- Mrs
Dalloway. It is no coincidence that the novel begins and (almost) ends with her name. It is a fine London morning and
Clarissa Dalloway goes out to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. She plunges into the life of the city
with intense, absorbing pleasure: all the sights, sounds, people, cars, things that come her way are filtered through her
mind. Past and present and mental impressions run through her mind with unbridled energy. The result is chaotic, vital
and fascinating, like person's stream of consciousness.
Clarissa's Party.
This extract comes from the end of the novel. Clarissa's party has been a success and some of the guests are already
leaving. Peter Walsh is talking to Sally Seaton; the two are making comments on the people present, and especially on
Clarissa. Sally knows that Peter is still in love with Clarissa, and she claims that even Clarissa used to care more for Peter
than she ever did for Richard, her husband. Talking about other people gives them the occasion to reflect on their own
lives too, on the time when they were young. Peter's superior knowledge suddenly vanishes at the end of the passage.