Virginia

Giulia
Woolf
Castegn
aro
Angela
Zebele

Inspirations

Contemporary world of
arts

Joyce, Ulysses
Stream of

consciousness
Free indirect style

Third person

Style and vocabulary

appropriate to the characte

Stream of
consciousness

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her.

The doors would be taken off their hinges;

Rumpelmayers men were coming.

And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning

fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

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 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?

From Mrs. Dalloway

Time
"The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between
them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong,
indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and
that".
"...overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at
forma a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunkey day"
"Through all ages when the pavement was grass, when it was
swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age
of silent sunrise."
(Mrs. Dalloway)

Time
"To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it

were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the
wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it
seemed, was, after a nights darkness and a days sail, within
touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great
clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must
let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is
actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood
any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise
and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests,
James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the
illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the
picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.
It was fringed with joy."
(To the lighthouse)

Memory
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, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.
"Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a
stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her
on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!"
"Everyone looked at the motorcar. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles
sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motorcar 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."

Life and Death

"...in people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the
bellow and the uproar; the carragies, motorcars, omnibuses,
vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrell
organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high
singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June."
"Fear no more the heat of the sun"
(Cymbelline, Shakespeare)

"But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him, the
young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it;
thrown it away."

Sea
"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;"
"...embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on
the waters"
"...somehow it was her disaster, her disgrace. It was her
punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a
woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand
here in evening dress."

Sanity and insanity

In this book I have almost too many ideas. I
want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want
to criticise the social system, & to show it at
work, at its most intense
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?
Diary, Saturday, October 14th, 1922

Privacy &
And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even
Communication
between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must

respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door;

for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against
his will, from ones husband, without losing ones
independence, ones self-respect something, after all,
priceless
And she watched out of the window the old lady
opposite climbing upstairs.[..]Somehow one respected
that that old woman looking out of the window, quite
unconscious that she was being watched. There was
something solemn in it but love and religion would
destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.
From Mrs Dalloway

Social Criticism
How he scolded her! How they argued! She
would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the
top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called
her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she
had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
But they could wait, they could wait, she said,
looking at the picture; meaning that her family, of
military men, administrators, admirals, had been
men of action, who had done their duty; and
Richards first duty was to his country

From Mrs

Women Conditions
"For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these
condescended to by these silly women. He had been
reading in his room, and now he came down and it all
seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy. Why did they
dress? He had come down in his ordinary clothes. He
had not got any dress clothes. "One never gets
anything worth having by post"that was the sort of
thing they were always saying. They made men say
that sort of thing. Yes, it was pretty well true, he
thought. They never got anything worth having from
one years end to another. They did nothing but talk,
talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the womens fault.
Women made civilisation impossible with all their
"charm," all their silliness."
From To The Lighthouse

Women Conditions
"The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two
(genders) live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a
man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman
also must have intercourse with the man in her (...). It is when this
fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertlized and uses all its
faculties. Perhaps a mind is purely masculine cannot create, any more
than a mind that is purely feminine. "
"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things, poetry depends
upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, from the
beginning of time. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing
poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of
one's own."
(A room of one's own)