Mrs Dalloway (1925)
A single June day in London as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for her party, intercut with the shell-shocked Septimus Smith
Literature · Novelists
Virginia Woolf
1882–1941 · English
Modernism; stream of consciousness; Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was a leading modernist novelist, essayist and publisher and a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves use stream of consciousness to render the inner life and the passage of time. Her essay A Room of One's Own became a founding text of feminist criticism.
How to spot them
- ▸Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for her party; Septimus Warren Smith
- ▸Mr and Mrs Ramsay and the painter Lily Briscoe (To the Lighthouse)
- ▸'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'
- ▸The Hogarth Press, founded with her husband Leonard Woolf
- ▸Orlando, the gender-changing hero inspired by Vita Sackville-West
Key works
To the Lighthouse (1927)
The Ramsay family's holidays on the Isle of Skye, split by the 'Time Passes' section
Orlando (1928)
Mock biography of a poet who lives for centuries and changes from man to woman
A Room of One's Own (1929)
Essay from Cambridge lectures on women and fiction, imagining Shakespeare's sister Judith
The Waves (1931)
Six friends' interwoven soliloquies from childhood to age
Jacob's Room (1922)
Her first fully experimental novel, portraying Jacob Flanders through others' impressions
Three Guineas (1938)
Book-length essay linking patriarchy, fascism and war
Between the Acts (1941)
Her last novel, set during a village pageant, published after her death
Key ideas
- Stream of consciousness and free indirect style to capture 'moments of being'
- 'On or about December 1910 human character changed', from her essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'
- A Room of One's Own argues women writers need financial independence and privacy, and that history has silenced them
Quick-fire facts
- •Daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her sister was the painter Vanessa Bell
- •Married Leonard Woolf in 1912; together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 at Hogarth House, Richmond
- •The Hogarth Press published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in Britain and English translations of Freud
- •Took part in the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, disguised as a member of a fake Abyssinian royal party
- •Mrs Dalloway's working title was 'The Hours', later used by Michael Cunningham for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
- •Flush (1933) is a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel
- •Lived at Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex; drowned herself in the River Ouse in March 1941
- •Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) puns on her name
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Sources
- British Library — Virginia Woolf
- Hermione Lee — Virginia Woolf