Virginia Woolf

Student’s Name: Antonela Silenzi

 Index

Introduction ………………………………………………………….Page 3
Biography …………………………………………………………….Page 5

• Early life ………………………………………………..…… Page 5

• Bloomsbury ………………………………………………… Page 7
• Suicide ……………………………………………………… Page 8

Work …………………………………………………………….……. Page 9

Modern scholarship and interpretations ……………………… Page
12
In films ………………………………………………………………... Page
14
Bibliography ………………………………………………………… Page 14

• Novels ………………………………………………………. Page 14

• Short story collections ………………………………….... Page 15
• "Biographies" ………………………………………………..Page 15
• Non-fiction books………………………………………….. Page 16
• Drama ………………………………………………………. Page 16
• Autobiographical writings and diaries………………... Page 17
• Letters …………………………………………….…………. Page 17
• Prefaces, contributions…………………………………... Page 17

Mrs Dalloway ……………………………………………………….. Page 17

Plot summary ………………………………………………………. Page

18

Style…………………………………………………………………… Page 20

Key facts……………………………………………………………... Page 21

Themes ……………………………………………………………… Page 23

2
• Feminism…………………………………………………… Page 23
• Homosexuality……………………………………………. Page 23
• Mental illness………………………………………….. Page 25
• Existential issues………………………………….…… Page 25

Analysis of Major Characters…………………………..…... Page 26

Film adaptation……………………………………………….. Page 31

Conclusion …………………………………………………….. Page 32

Bibliography……………………………………………………. Page 33

3
Introduction

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, epistler,

publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the
foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in

London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her
most famous works include the novel Mrs Dalloway wrote in 1925.

Mrs Dalloway portrayed not only the society of that period but
also Virginia Woolf’s mind and problems. Mrs Dalloway showed us her
personal style and it is one of the first works in which stream of
consciousness is used.

So I will provide information not only about Virginia Woolf’s life,

but also about Mrs Dalloway in order to illustrate the style, life and
relation between the author and her master piece.

4
Biography

Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline

Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her
mother, a famous beauty, Julia Prinsep
Stephen (born Jackson) (1846–1895), was
born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson and later moved to
England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-
Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones. Her father, Sir Leslie
Stephen, was a notable author, critic and mountaineer. The young
Virginia was educated by her parents in their literate and well-
connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents
had each been married previously and been widowed, and,
consequently, the household contained the children of three
marriages. Julia had three children from her first husband, Herbert
Duckworth: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Her father was
married to Minny Thackeray, and they had one daughter: Laura
Makepeace Stephen, who was declared mentally disabled and lived
with the family until she was institutionalized in 1891. Leslie and Julia
had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby Stephen
(1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian Stephen (1883).

5
 Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer,
and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of
Thackeray's youngest daughter), meant that his children were raised
in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary
society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron
(an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made
Virginia's honorary godfather, were among the visitors to the house.
Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an
attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned
beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-
Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these
influences was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from
which Virginia and Vanessa (unlike their brothers, who were formally
educated) were taught the classics and English literature.

According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood

memories, however, were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall,
where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens'
summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and
is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these
family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the
Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years,
most notably To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13,
and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of
Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in
1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly
institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods,

modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell)
have suggested, were also influenced by the sexual abuse she and
Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald

6
Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A
Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings

and associated illnesses. Though this instability often affected her
social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks until her
suicide.

Bloomsbury

After the death of their father and

Virginia's second nervous breakdown,
Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park
Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

Following studies at King's College, Cambridge, and King's

College London, Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell,
Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard
Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle
known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group
attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia
participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete
1940 talk on the Hoax has recently been discovered and is published
in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of
Time (2008).

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. Despite

his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their
engagement as a "penniless Jew") the couple shared a close bond.
Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "“Love-making — after 25

7
years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure
being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”" The two also
collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press,
which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by
T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others. The ethos of the
Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922,
Virginia met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of
Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual
relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf
presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in
which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both
genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's
son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." After
their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's
death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving
siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at the age
of 26.

Suicide

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously

published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression
similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World
War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the
cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all
worsened her condition until she was unable to work.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her

overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River
Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's skeletonised body
was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated

8
remains under a tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in
Rodmell, Sussex.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go

through another of those terrible times. And I can't recover this time. I
begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what
seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible
happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I
don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible
disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your
life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I
can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient
with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it.
If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything
has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on
spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been
happier than we have been. “

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times

Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of
the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in
1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company
Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled

Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly
changed the draft. An earlier
version of The Voyage Out has been
reconstructed by Woolf scholar
Louise DeSalvo and is now available

9
to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of
the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in
her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public

intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was
self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one
of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the
foremost modernists.

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English

language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-
consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional
motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World
War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of
Feminist criticism in the 1970s.

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the
upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be
lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate
anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned
common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also
criticized by some as an anti-semite, despite her being happily
married to a Jewish man. This anti-semitism is drawn from the fact
that she often wrote of Jewish characters in stereotypical archetypes
and generalizations. The overwhelming and rising 1920s and 30s anti-
semitism had an unavoidable influence on Virginia Woolf. She wrote

10
in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish
laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to the composer, Ethel Smyth,
quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her
boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies,
"How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have
immense vitality." In another letter to her dear friend Ethel Smyth,
Virginia gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, pointing to its
self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew has more religion in one
toe nail--more human love, in one hair." Virginia and her husband
Leonard Woolf actually hated and feared 1930s fascism with its anti-
semitism knowing they were on Hitler's blacklist. Her 1938 book
Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.[

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to

obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical
novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental:
a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—
and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive
consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a
world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the

ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime environments - of
most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the
efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus
Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the
First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The
plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection
upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One
of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative
process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in

11
the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon
the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the
people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how
women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength
from them.

Orlando (1928) has a different quality from all Virginia Woolf's

other novels suggested by its subtitle, "A Biography", as it attempts
to represent the character of a real person and is dedicated to Vita
Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for being a girl and for
the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment
of Vita and her work. In Orlando the techniques of historical
biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous
biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose

reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues
proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose
poem than to a plot-centered novel.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies
Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art,
sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and
life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set
in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost
all of English history. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not
only in feeling but in style being chiefly written in verse.

While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's

ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue
with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore,
among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.

Her works have been translated into over 50 languages, by

writers of the calibre of Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.

12
 Modern scholarship and interpretations

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and

lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical
essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and
Patricia Cramer. More controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo reads most
of Woolf's life and career through the lens of the incestuous sexual
abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her 1989 book
Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and
Work.

Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war,
class, and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A
Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the
difficulties female writers and intellectuals face because men hold
disproportionate legal and economic power, and the future of women
in education and society.

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for

the Sanity of Virginia Woolf takes the position that Leonard Woolf's
treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was
responsible for her death. The position, which is not accepted by
Leonard's family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the
gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. In contrast,
Victoria Glendinning's book Leonard Woolf: A Biography, which is
even more extensively researched and supported by
contemporaneous writings, argues that Leonard Woolf was not only
very supportive of his wife, but enabled her to live as long as she did
by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and
write. Accounts of Virginia's supposed anti-semitism (Leonard was a
secular Jew) are not only taken out of historical context but greatly
exaggerated. Virginia's own diaries support this view of the Woolfs'
marriage.

13
 Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her
lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972
by her nephew, Quentin Bell.

In 1992, Thomas Caramagno published the book The Flight of the

Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a

thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters

of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf:
An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of
Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her
commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas
Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of
Virginia Woolf was published in 2006.

Rita Martin’s play Flores no me pongan (2006) considers Woolf's

last minutes of life in order to debate polemical issues such as
bisexuality, Jewishness, and war. Written in Spanish, the play was
performed in Miami under the direction of actress Miriam Bermudez.

In films

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was an American play (1962) by

Edward Albee and film (1966) directed by Mike Nichols (screenplay by
Ernest Lehman adapted from the play). Virginia Woolf does not
appear as a character. According to the playwright, the title of the
play — which is about a dysfunctional university married couple —
refers to an academic joke about "who's afraid of living life without
false illusions".
• Virginia Woolf is a character in the film The Hours (2002). She is
portrayed by Nicole Kidman.

14
 Bibliography

Novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)

• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Short story collections

• Kew Gardens (1919)

• Monday or Tuesday (1921)
• The New Dress (1924)
• A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944)
• Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973)
• The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)

"Biographies"

Virginia Woolf published three books to which she gave the

subtitle "A Biography":

• Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually characterised Novel,

inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West)
• Flush: A Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as
"stream of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the
sense of telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning)

15
 • Roger Fry: A Biography (1940, usually characterised non-fiction,
however: "[Woolf's] novelistic skills worked against her talent as a
biographer, for her impressionistic observations jostled uncomfortably
with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of facts.")

Non-fiction books

• Modern Fiction (1919)

• The Common Reader (1925)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• On Being Ill (1930)
• The London Scene (1931)
• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
• Three Guineas (1938)
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
• The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
• The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
• Granite and Rainbow (1958)
• Books and Portraits (1978)
• Women And Writing (1979)
• Collected Essays (four volumes)

Drama

• Freshwater: A Comedy (performed in 1923, revised in 1935, and

published in 1976)

Autobiographical writings and diaries

• A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary

• Moments of Being (1976)
• A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia
Woolf from 1915 to 1941
• Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)

16
 • Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of
Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris
• The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, Expanded
Edition, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2008)

Letters

• Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)

• The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888-1941 (six volumes, 1975-
1980)
• Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)

Prefaces, contributions

• Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of

George Gissing ed. Alfred C. Gissing, with an introduction by Virginia
Woolf (London & New York, 1929)

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May

1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that
details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway
in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway
continues to be one of Woolf's best-known
novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs

Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished
"The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for
a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of
the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out

17
of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's
life and of the inter-war social structure.

Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-
language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Plot

Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one

woman’s life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks
through her London neighbourhood to prepare for the party she will
host that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old
suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. The
two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the
present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier,
Clarissa refused Peter’s marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite
gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband,
Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters
the room. Peter leaves and goes to Regent’s Park. He thinks about
Clarissa’s refusal, which still obsesses him.

The point of view then shifts to Septimus, a veteran of World War

I who was injured in trench warfare and now suffers from shell shock.
Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, pass time in Regent’s Park.
They are waiting for Septimus’s appointment with Sir William
Bradshaw, a celebrated psychiatrist. Before the war, Septimus was a
budding young poet and lover of Shakespeare; when the war broke
out, he enlisted immediately for romantic patriotic reasons. He
became numb to the horrors of war and its aftermath: when his friend
Evans died, he felt little sadness. Now Septimus sees nothing of worth
in the England he fought for, and he has lost the desire to preserve
either his society or himself. Suicidal, he believes his lack of feeling is
a crime. Clearly Septimus’s experiences in the war have permanently
scarred him, and he has serious mental problems. However, Sir

18
William does not listen to what Septimus says and diagnoses “a lack
of proportion.” Sir William plans to separate Septimus from Lucrezia
and send him to a mental institution in the country.

Richard Dalloway eats lunch with Hugh Whitbread and Lady

Bruton, members of high society. The men help Lady Bruton write a
letter to the Times, London's largest newspaper. After lunch, Richard
returns home to Clarissa with a large bunch of roses. He intends to
tell her that he loves her but finds that he cannot, because it has
been so long since he last said it. Clarissa considers the void that
exists between people, even between husband and wife. Even though
she values the privacy she is able to maintain in her marriage,
considering it vital to the success of the relationship, at the same
time she finds slightly disturbing the fact that Richard doesn’t know
everything about her. Clarissa sees off Elizabeth and her history
teacher, Miss Kilman, who are going shopping. The two older women
despise one another passionately, each believing the other to be an
oppressive force over Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia
are in their apartment, enjoying a moment of happiness together
before the men come to take Septimus to the asylum. One of
Septimus’s doctors, Dr. Holmes, arrives, and Septimus fears the
doctor will destroy his soul. In order to avoid this fate, he jumps from
a window to his death.

Peter hears the ambulance go by to pick up Septimus’s body and

marvels ironically at the level of London’s civilization. He goes to
Clarissa’s party, where most of the novel’s major characters are
assembled. Clarissa works hard to make her party a success but feels
dissatisfied by her own role and acutely conscious of Peter’s critical
eye. All the partygoers, but especially Peter and Sally Seton, have, to
some degree, failed to accomplish the dreams of their youth. Though
the social order is undoubtedly changing, Elizabeth and the members
of her generation will probably repeat the errors of Clarissa’s
generation. Sir William Bradshaw arrives late, and his wife explains

19
that one of his patients, the young veteran (Septimus), has
committed suicide. Clarissa retreats to the privacy of a small room to
consider Septimus’s death. She understands that he was
overwhelmed by life and that men like Sir William make life
intolerable. She identifies with Septimus, admiring him for having
taken the plunge and for not compromising his soul. She feels, with
her comfortable position as a society hostess, responsible for his
death. The party nears its close as guests begin to leave. Clarissa
enters the room, and her presence fills Peter with a great excitement.

Style

In Mrs Dalloway all of the action, excepting flashbacks, takes

place on a single day in June. It is an example of stream of
consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks the momentary
thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between
direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her
narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue,
direct interior narration follows at least twenty characters in this way,
but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus
Smith.

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is

commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text
that is often hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth
century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's novel. The Hogarth Press, run
by her and her husband Leonard, had to turn down the chance to
publish the novel because of the obscenity law in England.

Key Facts

 full title · Mrs. Dalloway

20
  author · Virginia Woolf
 type of work · Novel
 genre · Modernist; formalist; feminist
 language · English
 time and place written · Woolf began Mrs. Dalloway in
Sussex in 1922 and completed the novel in London in 1924.
 date of first publication · May 14, 1925
 publisher · Hogarth Press, the publishing house created by
Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917
 narrator · Anonymous. The omniscient narrator is a
commenting voice who knows everything about the characters. This
voice appears occasionally among the subjective thoughts of
characters. The critique of Sir William Bradshaw’s reverence of
proportion and conversion is the narrator’s most sustained
appearance.
 point of view · Point of view changes constantly, often
shifting from one character’s stream of consciousness (subjective
interior thoughts) to another’s within a single paragraph. Woolf most
often uses free indirect discourse, a literary technique that describes
the interior thoughts of characters using third-person singular
pronouns (he and she). This technique ensures that transitions
between the thoughts of a large number of characters are subtle and
smooth.
 tone · The narrator is against the oppression of the human
soul and for the celebration of diversity, as are the book’s major
characters. Sometimes the mood is humorous, but an underlying
sadness is always present.
 tense · Though mainly in the immediate past, Peter’s
dream of the solitary traveler is in the present tense.
 setting (time) · A day in mid-June, 1923. There are many
flashbacks to a summer at Bourton in the early 1890s, when Clarissa
was eighteen.

21
  setting (place) · London, England. The novel takes place
largely in the affluent neighborhood of Westminster, where the
Dalloways live.
 protagonist · Clarissa Dalloway
 major conflict · Clarissa and other characters try to
preserve their souls and communicate in an oppressive and
fragmentary post–World War I England.
 rising action · Clarissa spends the day organizing a party
that will bring people together, while her double, Septimus Warren
Smith, eventually commits suicide due to the social pressures that
oppress his soul.
 climax · At her party, Clarissa goes to a small room to
contemplate Septimus’s suicide. She identifies with him and is glad he
did it, believing that he preserved his soul.
 falling action · Clarissa returns to her party and is viewed
from the outside. We do not know whether she will change due to her
moment of clarity, but we do know that she will endure.
 themes · Communication vs. privacy; disillusionment with
the British Empire; the fear of death; the threat of oppression
 motifs · Time; Shakespeare; trees and flowers; waves and
water
 symbols · The prime minister; Peter Walsh’s pocketknife
and other weapons; the old woman in the window; the old woman
singing an ancient song
 foreshadowing
 · At the opening of the novel, Clarissa recalls having a
premonition one June day at Bourton that “something awful was
about to happen.” This sensation anticipates Septimus’s suicide.
 · Peter thinks of Clarissa when he wakes up from his nap
in Regent’s Park and considers how she has the gift of making the
world her own and standing out among a crowd. Peter states simply,

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“there she was,” a line he will repeat as the last line of the novel,
when Clarissa appears again at her party.

Themes

Feminism

As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character

highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House"
and embodies both sexual and economic repression. She keeps up
with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a
patrician politician, but she is still able to express herself and find
distinction in the parties she throws.

Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is

remembered as a great independent woman: she smoked cigars,
once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made
bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When
Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect
housewife, having married a self-made rich man and had five sons.

Homosexuality

Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- 34

years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest
moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel" (from "Mrs
Dalloway", Penguin Popular Classics 1996, page 36 OR Harcourt, Inc.
(2005), Page 35), but she does not recognize these feelings as signs
of homosexuality.

She and Sally fell a little behind. 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! The others disappeared; there she
was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present,

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wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond,
something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up
and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt
through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)

The relationship between Doris Kilman and Elizabeth Dalloway

demonstrates that the older may have certain lesbian feelings
towards Clarissa's daughter.

Similarly, Septimus is haunted by the image of his dear friend

Evans. Evans, his commanding officer is described as being
"undemonstrative in the company of women." Woolf describes
Septimus and Evans behaved together like "two dogs playing on a
hearth-rug" who, inseparable, "had to be together, share with each
other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other..." Jean E.
Kennard notes that the word "share" could easily be read in a
Forsteran manner, perhaps as in Forster's Maurice which testifies as
to the word's use in this period to describe homosexual relations.
Furthermore, Kennard is one to note Septimus' "increasing revulsion
at the idea of heterosexual sex", abstaining from sex with Rezia and
feels "the business of copulation was filth to him before the end."
Other critics contend that Septimus and Evans are intended as
parallels for T.S. Eliot and his dear friend Jean Verdenal, whom Eliot
mourned greatly.

Mental illness

Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed

criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression. Woolf
lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and
ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his

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condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent
confessions before he can make them.

There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's own

struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in
Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as
Septimus finally does). Woolf eventually committed suicide by
drowning.

Existential issues

When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half
an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as
one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's
thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of
private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most
of the plot points in Mrs Dalloway are realizations that the characters
make in their own heads.

Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized

as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes
from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments.
Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie
de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She
interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her
mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage is a farce.

Analysis of Major Characters

Clarissa Dalloway

Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of the novel, struggles constantly

to balance her internal life with the external world. Her world consists

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of glittering surfaces, such as fine fashion, parties, and high society,
but as she moves through that world she probes beneath those
surfaces in search of deeper meaning. Yearning for privacy, Clarissa
has a tendency toward introspection that gives her a profound
capacity for emotion, which many other characters lack. However,
she is always concerned with appearances and keeps herself tightly
composed, seldom sharing her feelings with anyone. She uses a
constant stream of convivial chatter and activity to keep her soul
locked safely away, which can make her seem shallow even to those
who know her well.

Constantly overlaying the past and the present, Clarissa strives

to reconcile herself to life despite her potent memories. For most of
the novel she considers aging and death with trepidation, even as she
performs life-affirming actions, such as buying flowers. Though
content, Clarissa never lets go of the doubt she feels about the
decisions that have shaped her life, particularly her decision to marry
Richard instead of Peter Walsh. She understands that life with Peter
would have been difficult, but at the same time she is uneasily aware
that she sacrificed passion for the security and tranquility of an
upper-class life. At times she wishes for a chance to live life over
again. She experiences a moment of clarity and peace when she
watches her old neighbor through her window, and by the end of the
day she has come to terms with the possibility of death. Like
Septimus, Clarissa feels keenly the oppressive forces in life, and she
accepts that the life she has is all she’ll get. Her will to endure,
however, prevails.

Septimus Warren Smith

Septimus, a veteran of World War I, suffers from shell shock and

is lost within his own mind. He feels guilty even as he despises
himself for being made numb by the war. His doctor has ordered
Lucrezia, Septimus’s wife, to make Septimus notice things outside

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himself, but Septimus has removed himself from the physical world.
Instead, he lives in an internal world, wherein he sees and hears
things that aren’t really there and he talks to his dead friend Evans.
He is sometimes overcome with the beauty in the world, but he also
fears that the people in it have no capacity for honesty or kindness.
Woolf intended for Clarissa to speak the sane truth and Septimus the
insane truth, and indeed Septimus’s detachment enables him to judge
other people more harshly than Clarissa is capable of. The world
outside of Septimus is threatening, and the way Septimus sees that
world offers little hope.

On the surface, Septimus seems quite dissimilar to Clarissa, but

he embodies many characteristics that Clarissa shares and thinks in
much the same way she does. He could almost be her double in the
novel. Septimus and Clarissa both have beak-noses, love
Shakespeare, and fear oppression. More important, as Clarissa’s
double, Septimus offers a contrast between the conscious struggle of
a working-class veteran and the blind opulence of the upper class. His
troubles call into question the legitimacy of the English society he
fought to preserve during the war. Because his thoughts often run
parallel to Clarissa’s and echo hers in many ways, the thin line
between what is considered sanity and insanity gets thinner and
thinner. Septimus chooses to escape his problems by killing himself, a
dramatic and tragic gesture that ultimately helps Clarissa to accept
her own choices, as well as the society in which she lives.

Peter Walsh

Peter Walsh’s most consistent character trait is ambivalence: he

is middle-aged and fears he has wasted his life, but sometimes he
also feels he is not yet old. He cannot commit to an identity, or even
to a romantic partner. He cannot decide what he feels and tries often
to talk himself into feeling or not feeling certain things. For example,
he spends the day telling himself that he no longer loves Clarissa, but

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his grief at losing her rises painfully to the surface when he is in her
presence, and his obsession with her suggests that he is still attracted
to her and may even long for renewed romance. Even when he
gathers his anger toward Clarissa and tells her about his new love, he
cannot sustain the anger and ends up weeping. Peter acts as a foil to
Richard, who is stable, generous, and rather simple. Unlike calm
Richard, Peter is like a storm, thundering and crashing, unpredictable
even to himself.

Peter’s unhealed hurt and persistent insecurity make him

severely critical of other characters, especially the Dalloways. He
detests Clarissa’s bourgeois lifestyle, though he blames Richard for
making her into the kind of woman she is. Clarissa intuits even his
most veiled criticisms, such as when he remarks on her green dress,
and his judgments strongly affect her own assessments of her life and
choices. Despite his sharp critiques of others, Peter cannot clearly see
his own shortcomings. His self-obsession and neediness would have
suffocated Clarissa, which is partly why she refused his marriage
proposal as a young woman. Peter acquiesces to the very English
society he criticizes, enjoying the false sense of order it offers, which
he lacks in his life. Despite Peter’s ambivalence and tendency toward
analysis, he still feels life deeply. While Clarissa comes to terms with
her own mortality, Peter becomes frantic at the thought of death. He
follows a young woman through the London streets to smother his
thoughts of death with a fantasy of life and adventure. His critical
nature may distance him from others, but he values his life
nonetheless.

Sally Seton

Sally Seton exists only as a figure in Clarissa’s memory for most

of the novel, and when she appears at Clarissa’s party, she is older
but still familiar. Though the women have not seen each other for
years, Sally still puts Clarissa first when she counts her blessings,

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even before her husband or five sons. As a girl, Sally was without
inhibitions, and as an adult at the party, she is still effusive and lacks
Clarissa’s restraint. Long ago, Sally and Clarissa plotted to reform the
world together. Now, however, both are married, a fate they once
considered a “catastrophe.” Sally has changed and calmed down a
great deal since the Bourton days, but she is still enough of a loose
cannon to make Peter nervous and to kindle Clarissa’s old warm
feelings. Both Sally and Clarissa have yielded to the forces of English
society to some degree, but Sally keeps more distance than Clarissa
does. She often takes refuge in her garden, as she despairs over
communicating with humans. However, she has not lost all hope of
meaningful communication, and she still thinks saying what one feels
is the most important contribution one can make to society.

Clarissa considers the moment when Sally kissed her on the lips
and offered her a flower at Bourton the “most exquisite moment of
her whole life.” Society would never have allowed that love to
flourish, since women of Clarissa’s class were expected to marry and
become society wives. Sally has always been more of a free spirit
than Clarissa, and when she arrives at Clarissa’s party, she feels
rather distant from and confused by the life Clarissa has chosen. The
women’s kiss marked a true moment of passion that could have
pushed both women outside of the English society they know, and it
stands out in contrast to the confrontation Peter remembers between
Sally and Hugh regarding women’s rights. One morning at Bourton,
Sally angrily told Hugh he represented the worst of the English middle
class and that he was to blame for the plight of the young girls in
Piccadilly. Later, Hugh supposedly kissed her in the smoking room.
Hugh’s is the forced kiss of traditional English society, while the kiss
with Clarissa is a revelation. Ultimately, the society that spurs Hugh’s
kiss prevails for both women.

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 Richard Dalloway

Richard’s simplicity and steadfastness have enabled him to build

a stable life for Clarissa, but these same qualities represent the
compromise that marrying him required. Richard is a simple,
hardworking, sensible husband who loves Clarissa and their daughter,
Elizabeth. However, he will never share Clarissa’s desire to truly and
fully communicate, and he cannot appreciate the beauty of life in the
same way she can. At one point, Richard tries to overcome his
habitual stiffness and shyness by planning to tell Clarissa that he
loves her, but he is ultimately too repressed to say the words, in part
because it has been so long since he last said them. Just as he does
not understand Clarissa’s desires, he does not recognize Elizabeth’s
potential as a woman. If he had had a son, he would have encouraged
him to work, but he does not offer the same encouragement to
Elizabeth, even as she contemplates job options. His reticence on the
matter increases the likelihood that she will eventually be in the same
predicament as Clarissa, unable to support herself through a career
and thus unable to gain the freedom to follow her passions.

Richard considers tradition of prime importance, rather than

passion or open communication. He champions the traditions England
went to war to preserve, in contrast to Septimus, and does not
recognize their destructive power. Despite his occasional misgivings,
Richard has close associations with members of English high society.
He is critical of Hugh, but they revere many of the same symbols,
including the figure of the grand old lady with money, who is helpless
when it comes to surviving in a patriarchal society. Richard likes the
fact that women need him, but sometimes he wrongly assumes they
do. For example, he does not recognize that a female vagrant may
not want his help but may instead enjoy living outside the rules of his
society. For Richard, this sort of freedom is unimaginable.

Film adaptation

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 A film version of Mrs Dalloway was made in 1997 by Dutch
feminist film director Marleen Gorris. It was adapted from Woolf's
novel by British actress Eileen Atkins and starred Vanessa Redgrave
in the title role. The cast included Natascha McElhone, Lena Headey,
Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Sarah Badel and Katie Carr.

Mrs Dalloway was a key element of the plot

of both the Michael Cunningham novel The Hours
and its subsequent screen adaptation.
Cunningham's title was derived from Woolf's
original title for Mrs Dalloway.

Conclusion

As we can see, during the whole monograph Virginia Woolf was

one of the most important figures of modern literature in English
history. Her works contained a new style in literature called stream of
consciousness that got its importance and recognition through those
works. As I explained above Mrs Dalloway contained not only her
personal style mixed up with the stream of consciousness, but also it
portrayed her own life. If we read it, we will be able to analyse it from
her own perspective and from the literary point of view. Although

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Woolf had serious mental problems during her life, it was not an
impediment for her to write the master pieces that we read
nowadays. Besides, we can hear her speaking through Septimus’ and
Clarissa´s voices. As a result, Virginia Woolf proved (through all her
works her talent, motivation and passion for literature. All these
elements consecrated her as one of the most important writers in
English Modern period.

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