VIRGINIA WOOLF

1882-1941

LIFE

·Born in London from a highly intellectual family: father critic and philosopher.

·After her father's death she lived in Bloomsbury with her brothers and sisters.

·Brother Toby died in 1906 -- mental breakdown

·Periods of depression and mental illness

·1912 married essayst and journalist Leonard Woolf

·1917 founded the Hogarth Press with her husband

·March 1941 she drowned herself in a river near her home in Sussex

WORKS

·1915 The Voyage out·1919 Night and Day·1925 Mrs Dalloway·1927 To the Lighthouse·1928 Orlando·1931 The Waves·1941 Between the Acts

CRITICAL WORKS·1925-32 The Common Reader·1929 A Room of One's Own

THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

Vanessa Bell 1912

As part of the post-impressionist experiment, Bell here blurs the facial features of her sister to highten the sense of intimacy

By Duncan Grant.

Vanessa is shown seated in the Garden Room at Charleston. The portrait conveys the light, heat and ease of a summer day.

·A group of artists and intellectuals·unconventional ideas·anticonformist attitudes·the best known members included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.

What was the Bloomsbury group ?

THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

MOMENTS OF BEING

·Moments of intensity, perception or vision which illuminate our lives.

·In "The Common Reader" Woolf described the task of the writer: to represent mental processes as they take place.

·To do so she used indirect interior monologue.

·She takes the point of view of the characters speaking from "within" their minds, showing their thoughts, feelings and sensations as they occur.

·Nevertheless, there is still the occasional presence of a narrator who, however invisible, gives some order to the characters' thoughts by arranging them in logical and grammatical sequence.

·Woolf is intersted in the impressions of the characters who experience the events, not in the events.

·She is particularly interested in female subjectivity.(heroine to many feminists)

MRS DALLOWAY 1925

·The events of a single day in central London

·Clarissa Dalloway, the 51-year-old wife of a politicianleaves home in the morning to buy flowers for the party she has organized for the evening

·Her changing moods and memories interwave with the sights and the sounds of the city.

·We see her through the eyes and thoughts of other characters.

·Her day is contrasted with that of Septimus Smith a disturbed, shell shocked war veteran.

·News of his death intrudes upon Clarissa's party.

FEATURES AND THEMES

·Clarissa's interior monologue is interwoven with the sights and sounds of the city.

·Woolf portrays interior time in contrast with cronological time.

·The delated quality of Clarissa's interior time is interrupted by the chimes of Big Ben.

·Clarissa's trajectory towards the flower shop is interrupted by the tunnels that open up in her mind which throw her into the depths of the past and the uncertain ground of the future.

·The Characters of Clarissa and Septimus are mutually dependent: Mrs Dalloway seeing the truth. Septimus Smith seeing the insane truth.

·Like Clarissa, Septimus moves about London and the chaos of his mind merges with the physical act of walking but he is unable to hold together all the threads of experience and sensation that invade his mind

CLARISSA AND SEPTIMUS