VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 in London. As a baby she used to spend a lot of her time with her
family in their house in Cornwall near the sea, which she considered her small piece of paradise.
Unfortunately after the death of her mother her family was forced to sell their house and Virginia
started to suffer from depression, becoming shy and moody.
A few years later her sister and also her father died and she felt isolated and in a moment of
weakness and mental anguish she attempted suicide by taking drugs.
She survived and in 1904 moved to Bloombsbury in central London where, along with her brother
and sister, she founded a circle of intellectuals: the Bloombsbury Group, a circle of intellectual such
as John Keynes, Forster, her husband Leonard Woolf, was the expression of the new tendencies in
which manners and moral were drastically changed. They were anti monarchist in politics, sceptical
in religion, open-minded and refined in art and literature. Some of the values they support were the
dislike of vulgarity, the sense of humour, the freedom from superstition and prudery and the desideri
for complete self-expression and liberal education.
NB: Virginia liked to live in a cultivated environment, to be listened to and to have many people
around her. When she was alone she was overcome by anxiety and insecurity by terror of the brevity
of life. She suffered from schizophrenia and the Second World War increased her terror and her
obsession of fear of madness and she decides to drown herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
In 1915 she published her first novel The Boyage Out. The publication of Night and Day was followed
by Mrs Dalloway in 1925, To the Lighthouse in 1927 and the Waves in 1931.
She was also an easy isto and critic. Her most acute critical work is collected in Athens Common
Reader and A Room of One's Own.

Literary stile
According to Virginia Woolf people and, as a consequence, characters, are not only their actions but
above all who they truly are. The novel has to turn inwards and explore man's mental experience.
The external reality is important only for the influence it has on the inner life, the life of the mind. To
get through and analyze the mental life and process she eliminated traditional plots and directs
dialogues and turned to interior monologues used to represent the gap between chronological and
interior time. Rather than charting the linear sequence of events in the traditional way she is
interested in the impressions of the characters who experience these events and in their subjectivity.
What became important for the writer was what she called "the moments of being" which is the
moments of utmost intensity, of perception, of vision in the "incessant shower of innumerable atoms"
that strike our minds every day.
The role of the writer is "to trace the pattern of the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in
which they fall, disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores
upon the consciousness".
So she is interested in a particular method of narration which consists in trying to compress the
process into minimum time units, using a variety of techniques. As a result, time is often dilated and
a single moment can last for a very long time as well as it is sometimes expanded about centuries.

MRS DALLOWAY
Plot
The action of Mrs Dalloway is limited to the events of a single day in central London. It opens on a
morning as Clarissa Dalloway, the 51 year-old wife of a politician, leaves home to buy flowers for the
party sua has organized for the evening. During the day, Clarissa is captured in her many changing
moods and memories. Walking around London, Clarissa's physical impressions of the city are
interwoven with her mental associations and reveries, while the dilated quality of her interior time is
interrupted by the chimes of Big Ben.
Abstract
It is Mrs Dalloway herself who poses the problem of defining a person's character at the beginning
of this passage when she thinks: 'she would not say of any one in the world now that they were this
or were that'. Her refusal to categories or try to define people indicat S how inadequate the notion of
character is to capture the fluid, constantly changing processes of life and thought. Like that of
London. Mrs Dalloway's description, rather than being a physical or even psychological portrait,
consists of a succession of fragmented thoughts, memories and sense impressions. These do not
give us the idea of a relatively fixed and knowable character but rather of a form of disintegration like
a mirror image that has shattered into a thousand pieces which Mrs Dalloway collects in her mind.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)

Plot
The novel is divided into three parts constructed in such a way that they obey a precise design
according to which they graphically reproduce the beams of light of the lighthouse: a first long one,
followed by a pause of darkness and then by another flash.
Part 1 opens on a September evening on a island where the Ramesh family are on holiday. There
are eight children and a little group of intellectual guests. Mrs Ramsay, a beautiful sweet woman has
promised her youngest son to let him go on a trip to the lighthouse but the trip does not take place
owing to bad weather.
Part 2 covers a span of ten years which are virtually compressed into one dark night. Mrs Ramsay
suddenly dies and we come to know that also her daughter and her son are dead.
Part 3 is set in one day, ten years later when the Ramsay return to the old house with some friends
and, at last, James can take the trip to the lighthouse.
Features and themes
In compliance with the stream of consciousness technique the work is riche in symbols and imagery
such as the alternation of light and darkness in the flow of life, the transition from innocence to
experience, the death and the sea, so much loved by Virginia. The sea now consoling and protective,
now menacing and destructive, stands therefore for life itself and for the inexorable flow of time.
Abstract
Mrs Ramsay is trying to console James in case the trip to the Lightouse shouldn't take place the day
after. She is knitting a stocking for the house keeper's little boy and wants to measure it against
James leg. Meanwhile, through the window which she is sitting by, she sees William and Lily walking
outside, and thins that they should marry. Since James, a bit jealous, purposely fidgets, she looks
up at him and she sees the state the house is in. The sight eventually leads her to remember Marie,
the Swiss girl whose father is dying of Cancer. At the recollection, irritated, she orders James to
stand still and realizes that the stocking is to short.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOYCE AND WOOLF

Woolf and Joyce differ in their approaches to the question of how to represent stream of
consciousness. Woolf's fiction is more readable in a traditional sense than Joyce's. Joyce is
fundamentally concerned with the possibilities and limitations of language in all its modes and forms,
whereas Woolf is more interested in the fluidity of identity and in the relations which exist between
people and things.