Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941)
Her father Leslie Stephen
was an eminent Victorian
man of letters.
She grew up in a literary
and intellectual
atmosphere with free
access to her father’s library

Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression

the death of her mother her stepbrothers

when she was 13

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941)

Suicide

The Second World War increased her

anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts
of her suicide note, she put rocks into
her pockets and drowned herself in the
River Ouse.

Virginia Woolf.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career

The Bloomsbury Group  In 1904

she moved to Bloomsbury and became a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. This
meant the rejection of traditional morality
and artistic convention.

Experimentation  best known as one

The Bloomsbury Group of the great experimental novelists during
the modernist period.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career
Evolution of her style in her main novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)

Traditional
• Night and Day (1917) narratives

• Jacob’s room (1922) Narrative experimentation with the

novel
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
A more completely developed
“stream-of-consciousness
• To the Lighthouse (1927) technique”

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career
A feminist writer  the themes of androgyny, women and writing

Describes Clarissa Dalloway and

• Mrs Dalloway (1925) Sally Seton’s relationship as young
women

• Orlando (1928) Deals with androgyny

Shows Woolf’s concern with the

• A Room of One’s Own (1929) questions of women’s subjugation
and the relationship between women
and writing

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

3. A Modernist novelist
• Main aim  to give voice to the complex
inner world of feeling and memory.

• The human personality  a continuous

shift of impressions and emotions.

• Narrator  disappearance of the

omniscient narrator.

• Point of view  shifted inside the

characters’ minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary
Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
impressions presented as a continuous flux. Tate Gallery, London

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

4. Woolf vs Joyce
Woolf’s stream of Joyce’s stream of
consciousness consciousness

never lets her characters’ characters show their

thoughts flow without control, thoughts directly through
maintains logical and interior monologue,
grammatical organisation sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically
unorthodox way

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being
Rare moments of insight
during the characters’ daily
life when they can see
reality behind appearances
The Prose and the Passion
Epiphanies
The sudden spiritual
manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external
object  the character is
led to a self-realization
about himself/herself
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Takes place on a single ordinary day
in June 1923.

• Follows the protagonist through a

very small area of London, from the
morning to the night of the day on
which she gives a large formal party.

• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the

climax of the novel and unifies the
Cover for the first edition of Mrs. narrative by gathering all the people
Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,
1925. she thinks about during the day.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Clarissa Dalloway
• A London society lady of fifty-one,
the wife of a Conservative MP,
Richard Dalloway, who has
conventional views on women’s
rights.

• Had a possessive father, refused

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s Peter Walsh, a man who would force
1997 film adaptation
her to share everything.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Clarissa Dalloway
• Characterized by opposing feelings:
her need for freedom and
independence and her class
consciousness.

• Her life appears to be an effort towards

order and peace, an attempt to
overcome her weakness and sense of
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation failure.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Septimus Warren Smith
• A young poet and lover of
Shakespeare.

• When the war broke out,

enlisted for patriotic reasons.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film

• An extremely sensitive man who
adaptation
can suddenly fall prey to panic
and fear, or feelings of guilt.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Septimus Warren Smith

• A character specifically
connected with the war.

• Suffers from headaches and

insomnia.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film • Finally commits suicide.
adaptation

The Prose and the Passion