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Virginia Woolf
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 father’s library
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression
the death of her mother
when she was 13
her stepbrothers
Virginia Woolf
Only Connect ... New Directions
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

1. Life (1882-1941)
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.
Suicide
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
The Bloomsbury Group

2. Literary career
Evolution of her style in her main novels
• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1917)
• Jacob’s room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
A more completely developed
“stream-of-consciousness
technique”
Narrative experimentation with the
novel
Traditional
narratives
Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career
A feminist writer  the themes of androgyny, women and writing
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Orlando (1928)
• A Room of One’s Own
(1929)
Describes Clarissa Dalloway and
Sally Seton’s relationship as young
women
Deals with androgyny
Shows Woolf’s concern with the
questions of women’s subjugation
and the relationship between women
and writing
Virginia Woolf

• 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.
3. A modernist novelist
Virginia Woolf
Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
Tate Gallery, London

4. Woolf vs Joyce
Woolf’s stream of
consciousness
Joyce’s stream of
consciousness
never lets her characters’
thoughts flow without control,
maintains logical and
grammatical organisation
characters show their
thoughts directly through
interior monologue,
sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically
unorthodox way
Virginia Woolf

Moments of being Epiphanies
Rare moments of insight
during the characters’ daily
life when they can see
reality behind appearances
The sudden spiritual
manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external
object  the character is
led to a self-realization
about himself/herself
Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce

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 Dalloway’s party is the
climax of the novel and unifies the
narrative by gathering all the people
she thinks about during the day.
Virginia Woolf
Cover for the first edition of Mrs.
Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,
1925.

• A London society lady of fifty-one,
the wife of a Conservative MP,
Richard Dalloway, who has
conventional views on women’s
rights.
• Had a possessive father, refused
Peter Walsh, a man who would force
her to share everything.
Clarissa Dalloway
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s
1997 film adaptation
Virginia Woolf

• 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.
Virginia Woolf
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation
Clarissa Dalloway

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 Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation
Virginia Woolf

Septimus Warren Smith
• A character specifically
connected with the war.
• Suffers from headaches and
insomnia.
• Finally commits suicide.
Virginia Woolf
Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation

The Window  It starts just
before World War I. It is set
during a summer afternoon
and evening in a summer
home on the Isle of Skye in
the Hebrides
No traditional plot  a series of experiences, memories, emotions
and feelings held together by symbols.
The story develops over a period of ten years.
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
Divided into three sections:
1.
Virginia Woolf
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in
1830.

Time Passes  covers
about ten years. The
children grow up, war
breaks out, Mrs Ramsay
dies suddenly one night.
Her eldest son, Andrew, is
killed in battle, and her
daughter Prue dies too. The
summerhouse falls into a
state of decay for ten years
until the family comes back.
2.
Virginia Woolf
1830.

The Lighthouse  lasts
less than one day. time
experienced, and especially
recaptured in memory,
replaces outer time. Mr
Ramsay, his son James
and his daughter Cam sail
to the lighthouse. Lily
succeeds in finishing her
painting.
3.
Virginia Woolf
1830.

• A beautiful woman and loving wife,
constantly provides support to the
other characters in the novel.
• As a mother, her main objective is to
preserve her son James’s sense of
hope and wonder in relation to the
lighthouse.
7. To the Lighthouse: characters
MRS RAMSAY
Virginia Woolf
Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.

MRS RAMSAY
• She realizes that the beauty of
this world is ephemeral and
should be protected.
• She has the ability to bring
together different things into a
whole.
• After her death, Lily and the other
characters try to reach this unity.
Virginia Woolf
Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.

• A painter who fears her work
will end up in attics or under a
couch.
• Rejects the conventional
image of the woman
represented by Mrs Ramsay.
LILY BRISCOE
Virginia Woolf
Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting,
1915, National Galleries of Scotland.

• Her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay
embodies her doubts: at the
beginning of the novel she cannot
make sense of the shapes and
colours that she tries to
reproduce.
• Undergoes a drastic change
evolving into an artist who
achieves her final vision.
LILY BRISCOE
Virginia Woolf
Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting,
1915, National Galleries of Scotland.

Transience  the idea that nothing lasts runs
through the novel
8. To the Lighthouse: themes
a.
 Mrs Ramsay does not want
her children to become adults.
 The house falls into decay.
 Death unexpectedly ends life.
Virginia Woolf
St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse

b. Loss
 Minta loses her brooch on the
beach.
 The family loses some of its
members.
Virginia Woolf

c. Art  the ambition to stop the flux of time is embodied by
the artist Lily Briscoe.
d. The force of love 
Mrs Ramsay believes that
also love can create durable
memories making moments
permanent.
Virginia Woolf

9. To the Lighthouse: symbolism
The sound of the sea  the
fullness of life and the imminence of
death, uncertainty.
The land and the house  idea of
shelter and stability.
The window  the dividing and
connecting point between the self and
society.
Virginia Woolf
A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed
by Stephen Daldry.

9. To the Lighthouse: symbolism
The lighthouse
•a positive symbol linked to light,
comfort, hope and enthusiasm, a
reference point in a changing world.
•the inaccessible destination leading to
frustration and threatening danger.
Virginia Woolf
A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed
by Stephen Daldry.

• Woolf had been invited to give a
lecture on the topic of Women and
Fiction. She advanced the thesis
that “a woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction”.
• Her essay is constructed as a
partly-fictionalized narrative of
the steps that led her to adopt this
thesis.
10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Virginia Woolf
A contemporary edition of A Room
of One’s Own.

• She dramatizes that mental process in the
character of an imaginary narrator (“call
me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael or by any name you please--it
is not a matter of any importance”).
• The narrator reflects on the different
educational experiences available to men
and women as well as on more material
differences in their lives.
• The figure of Judith Shakespeare is
generated as an example of the tragic fate a
highly intelligent woman would have met.

Virginia Woolf
of One’s Own.

• She considers the achievements of the
major women novelists of the nineteenth
century and reflects on the importance
of tradition to an aspiring writer.
• Woolf closes the essay with an
exhortation to her audience of women to
take up the tradition that has been so
hardly bequeathed to them, and to
increase the endowment for their own
daughters.
Virginia Woolf
of One’s Own.

Women’s position in
fiction and in real life.
Critique of patriarchal
society.
Struggle for women’s
rights.
MAIN THEMES
Virginia Woolf

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