Virginia Woolf Research

English Unseen

Overview of career

• Founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, married Leonard Woolf in 1912, founded Hogarth Press in 1917 to publish her work

• First novel The Voyage Out published in 1917. Major interwar novels: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), and the essays A room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)

• Concerned with women’s experience, considered a feminist and modernist

Contexts that influenced her

• Social: The Bloomsbury Group known for repudiating public social rituals of the Victorians and rigid ideas on gender and sexuality

• Historical: WWI and its aftermath, significant theme in Mrs Dalloway

• Intellectual: In her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction”, she rejected her “materialist” forerunners and praised runners who attempt to come closer to life. She borrowed Bergson’s distinction between chronological and psychological time

One relevant prose work

Mrs Dalloway (1925): a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a politician Richard Dalloway, who is hosting a party. Parallel strand follows Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from shell shock, and the two lives meet when news of his suicide reaches the party

Distinctive features of her prose work

1. Free indirect discourse: narration flows between third person and characters’ thoughts. Critic Randall Stevenson suggests that “interior monologue” is a better term than “stream of consciousness” to describe her style in Modernist Fiction: An Introduction.

2. Experimentation with time: Big Ben’s chimes represent mechanical clock time, set against the characters’ longer psychological time

How her work engages with the period

• Portrays a city and city scarred by war. Septimus is the only character who really reckons with the war, while others hide their scars

• Critiques rigid social structures of post-war England, with Clarissa and Septimus acting as doubles

• Woolf embraced modernist experimentation