Life & Background
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882 to Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and grew up in a house full of books and Victorian literary connections but was denied the university education given to her brothers — a deprivation she wrote about all her life. After her parents' deaths she moved with her siblings to Bloomsbury, where the group that took the district's name formed around them. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and together they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her novels, Eliot, and the English Freud. She suffered recurrent severe mental illness from adolescence. She drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941, leaving a note for Leonard.
Mrs Dalloway
On a June day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London buying flowers for a party she will give that evening. Her thoughts return to a summer at Bourton thirty years earlier, to Peter Walsh, who wanted to marry her and who arrives back from India that morning, and to Sally Seton, whose kiss remains the most exquisite moment of her life. Running parallel and never meeting her is Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who sees his dead officer in the park and is being managed by doctors who recommend rest and proportion. Ordered into an institution, Septimus throws himself from a window. News of his death reaches Clarissa's party through her doctor guest, and she withdraws to think about it, feeling obscurely that he has preserved something she has compromised.
Woolf abandons chronological plot for a single day held together by two devices: the striking of Big Ben, which returns the reader to shared clock time, and the tunnelling process she described in her diary, in which the past is dug out behind each character. Free indirect discourse moves between minds without announcement, so that consciousness is presented as continuous and social rather than isolated. The pairing of Clarissa and Septimus, who never meet, sets a woman's constrained social life against a man's destruction by war and medical authority, and her essay Modern Fiction supplies the argument behind the method — that life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged but a luminous halo, and the novelist's task is to record the ordinary mind on an ordinary day.
Why Woolf Matters
Woolf is central to modernist fiction and to feminist criticism at once. A Room of One's Own — with its argument that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write, and its invention of Shakespeare's sister to show what would have happened to an equally gifted woman — founded the modern feminist account of literary history, and Three Guineas extended it to fascism and patriarchy. Her essays established a body of criticism as influential as her fiction, and Orlando's three-century, sex-changing biography made her important to gender studies well beyond her own period.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Voyage Out1915
- Jacob's Room1922
- Mrs Dalloway1925
- To the Lighthouse1927
- Orlando1928
- A Room of One's Own1929
- The Waves1931
- Three Guineas1938