35. VIRGINIA WOOLF

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Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf.
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Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Her father Leslie Stephen was an eminent
Victorian man of letters.
She grew up in a literary and intellectual
atmosphere with free access to her fathers
library
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse
led to depression
the death of her mother when she was 13
her stepbrothers
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Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Suicide
The Second World War increased her anxiety and
fears. After rewriting drafts of her suicide
note, she put rocks into her pockets and drowned
herself in the River Ouse.
Virginia Woolf.
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
The Bloomsbury Group ? In 1904 she moved to
Bloomsbury and became a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. This meant the rejection of traditional
morality and artistic convention.
Experimentation ? best known as one of the great
experimental novelists during the modernist
period.
The Bloomsbury Group
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
Evolution of her style in her main novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1917)
• Jacobs room (1922)
• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)

Traditional narratives
Narrative experimentation with the novel
A more completely developed stream-of-consciousne
ss technique
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
A feminist writer ? the themes of androgyny,
women and writing
Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Setons
relationship as young women

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• Orlando (1928)
• A Room of Ones Own (1929)

Deals with androgyny
Shows Woolfs concern with the questions of
womens subjugation and the relationship between
women and writing
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
3. A Modernist novelist

• Main aim ? to give voice to the complex inner
  world of feeling and memory.
• The human personality ? a continuous shift of
  impressions and emotions.
• Narrator ? disappearance of the omniscient
  narrator.
• Point of view ? shifted inside the characters
  minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas,
  momentary impressions presented as a continuous
  flux.

Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate
Gallery, London
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Woolfs stream of consciousness
Joyces stream of consciousness
characters show their thoughts directly through
interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically unorthodox way
never lets her characters thoughts flow without
control, maintains logical and grammatical
organisation
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being
Epiphanies
The sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external object ? the
character is led to a self-realization about
himself/herself
Rare moments of insight during the characters
daily life when they can see reality behind
appearances
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Takes place on a single ordinary day in June
  1923.
• Follows the protagonist through a very small area
  of London, from the morning to the night of the
  day on which she gives a large formal party.
• Clarissa Dalloways party is the climax of the
  novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all
  the people she thinks about during the day.

Cover for the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway,
London, Hogarth Press, 1925.
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway

• A London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a
  Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has
  conventional views on womens rights.
• Had a possessive father, refused Peter Walsh, a
  man who would force her to share everything.

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorriss 1997 film adaptation
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway

• Characterized by opposing feelings her need for
  freedom and independence and her class
  consciousness.
• Her life appears to be an effort towards order
  and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness
  and sense of failure.

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorriss 1997 film adaptation
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith

• A young poet and lover of Shakespeare.
• When the war broke out, enlisted for patriotic
  reasons.
• An extremely sensitive man who can suddenly fall
  prey to panic and fear, or feelings of guilt.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorriss
1997 film adaptation
The Prose and the Passion
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith

• A character specifically connected with the war.
• Suffers from headaches and insomnia.
• Finally commits suicide.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorriss
1997 film adaptation
The Prose and the Passion