Her aims of life were exploration of the human soul.

And just like all other artists she

also wanted to paint a picture of real life as she saw it. But she had her own vision of life; she
wanted to accept only the ultimate beauty of life, that is the beauty of the spirit and aimed at
conveying it through her novels.
The Myriad Impressions—Fluidity of Life
To Virginia Woolf life appeared as a mass of myriad impressions, all beautifully and
spiritually collected. And her chief aim was to communicate the sense of reality through
fiction. But Mrs. Woolf’s conception of reality vastly differed from that of the materialists or
naturalists .
She says in her essay ‘’modern fiction”
”Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible?’
She strongly believed that the proper stuff of fiction is something other than custom
would have us believe it. Human consciousness is a chaotic flow of sensations and
impressions.
And as David Cecil puts it “Through the eyes of one or more of her characters she
strove simply to record the actual process of living, to trace the confused succession of
impression and thought and mood as it drifted cloud like across the clear mirror of
consciousness”.
But she knew that art requires a selection and ordering of material and hence only those
aspects of experiences are picked out which harmonise with her sensibility, with her vision of
life. And she has clear ideas of the proper stuff of fiction too, like every feeling, every
thought, sensation etc
Pursuit of Beauty—Satisfying Aesthete
Virginia was a great lover of beauty and this love of beauty guides her in her selection
and ordering of reality.
According to David Cecil, Virginia Woolf could find beauty “as much in a scrap of
orange peel lying in the gutter as in the Venus de Melo; as easily walking down the
Huston Road as within the consecrated portals of the National Gallery.’’
It means that her aestheticism is the expression of an intense vitality, as, home in the
bustle and clamour of the modern age, inspired by no fatigued desire to escape from a
present, that is too much for her, into the safe calm of a dead past. As presented by her, the
aesthetic life is vigorous and satisfying as any other kind of life. And for us too, while we are
reading her books, as long as their spell is on us we do not bother about the limitations of her
vision. the emphasis on the aesthetic aspect of life makes her novels contemplative, for
aesthetic experiences are contemplative affairs. She finds beauty in every minute object. She
has this ability of relating the worldly things with soul of nature. Woolf was a collector of
moments. She was a writer who watched the world and ached to record every detail . She herself declared
the importance of the material: “We sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own
experience”. Objects are imbued with meaning, and Woolf was someone who understood this acutely.
 Example in to the lighthouse
The absence of fruit basket in 3rd part, signifies the transitory nature of beauty, art and
truth.
Characters are Lonely Figures
her characters as presented to us are essentially lonely figures. For example Mrs. Ramsay,
Lily Briscoe and many other important characters are really very lonely figures. Only their
inner life matters to them, and this they do not share with anybody else. In fact their relations
with others, are of significance to them, only in so far as they enrich their inner life.
For example
Mrs. Ramsay lives in the crowd alone. Though she cares about her family and friends busily
everyday, her heart is lonely. She has never opened the heart widely to people around her not
even her husband and she is lonely and arrogant lighthouse herself.

Transience of Life and Beauty

Virginia Woolf is adequately conscious of the frailty of life and transience of beauty.
This fleeting and changing life makes her sad and melancholy.
According to a critic: “The fact of beauty, on the one hand, the fact of mutability, on the
other, these are the two Poles on which her panorama of human experience revolves. In To
The Lighthouse she seems to suggest that there is a permanent principle of beauty at work in
the universe behind the visible and the palpable. But, in fact, the vision which permeates
most of her books is that of a life so beautiful yet so sad and melancholy.”
Her Vision and the Form of the Novel
No clash, no Violent Passions: Her vision of life determines the form of her novels too.
Almost all her characters are solitary. Hence there is hardly any clash of characters. Hence
we find her characters seldom coming into direct contact with each other.
Then as there is no clash of characters, there is hardly any scope for displaying intense or
violent passion in her novels. Her vision of life makes her mainly concerned with the
aesthetic aspects of life without caring very little for the moral ones. Hence her characters are
shown as beautiful and ugly, happy or sad, but not bad and good. And the atmosphere is
generally cold, unfit for love or hatred. We find Lily Briscoe admiring William Bankes and
appreciating his friendly attitude. But even then she watches him with cool critical eyes.
Again we find her characters not so keen on having intimate contacts with each other; they
rather prefer isolation, and are happy in it. Thus Mrs. Ramsay longs for loneliness so that she
may muse alone and give free rein to her thoughts. Lily remains an old maid to the end. And
to Tansley and William Bankes social gatherings mean a sheer waste of time.
So Mrs. Woolf’s novels are without clash of characters, without action and drama and
with very little moral values. Intense love is outside her range. That is why she fails to
convince of the reality of Ramsay at the death of his wife. In fact she is bound to fail when
she wants to depict something outside the limitations of her vision.

Beauty of the Commonplace; Her accuracy

 We have already mentioned that Mrs. Woolf’s appreciation of beauty is not just confined
to what is commonly accepted as beautiful. And for this she very much succeeds in opening
our eyes to new sources of aesthetic delight. She can discover beauty in ugliness—‘as much
in a scrap of orange peel lying in the gutter and hence can make her readers also see it and
appreciate it.
We find Lily Briscoe admiring the beauty of Mr. Ramsay’s boots and Mrs. Ramsay
considering it wonderful to marry a man with a gold watch in a lovely wash-leather case in
To The Lighthouse. she has the superb power of combining beauty with accuracy.
According to a critic: “Not only does she illuminate our appreciation of what we already
think beautiful, she opens our eyes; to the new sources ‘of delight’. Far more successful than
any contemporary she has disengaged the aesthetic quality in the modern sense. She always
combines beauty with accuracy, and gets the effects not by idealising and decorating it, but
simply by isolating and indicating those aspects of her subject that appeal to the aesthetic
sense.”
without casting any haze of romantic glamour it is made to look beautiful just because
Mrs. Woolf has drawn our attention to its beautiful aspects while describing the flower shop
there in her own inimitable way. She can also be solemnly serious and can burst into poetical
rhapsodies in her descriptions of beauties of life and nature. Time Passes, the second part of
To The Lighthouse illustrates it wonderfully and hence the credit of poetising and
musicalising the novel of subjectivity must go to her.
Conclusion
While expressing the very essence of his artistic creed,
Walter Pater has said: “To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in
which means and ends are indentified to encourage such treatment, the true moral
significance of art and poetry.”
And Mrs. Woolf also thinks the novel to be a means to that lofty end. Here is a
temperament almost painfully alive to the feeling of life—the excitement aroused in her by
the process of living and the perception of objects.
We may conclude by quoting the very apt comments of David Daiches : “Her picture of
life, as a thing of beauty, is enlivened all the time by little strokes of humour and
observation, it is diversified by an incessantly changing procession of moods; it is made
vital by her unsleeping curiosity about everything great and small that comes within
her line of vision.”