To the Lighthouse-V.woolf
Content
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. The freely, multiply
discursive tale centers on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland
between 1910 and 1920.
To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel
Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the
prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no
action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of
childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the
book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.
Plot summary
Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.
The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring James that they should be able to visit the
lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty
that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr and
Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to
on various occasions throughout the chapter, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs
Ramsay's relationship.
The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues,
one of them being Lily Briscoe who begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter
attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by
doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley,
another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer
of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises.
The section closes with a large dinner party. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus
Carmichael, a visiting poet, when the latter asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay,
who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta
Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to
dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.
Part II: Time Passes
The second section is employed by the author to give a sense of time passing. Woolf
explained the purpose of this section, writing that it was 'an interesting experiment [that
gave] the sense of ten years passing.' [1]. This section's role in linking the two dominant parts
of the story was also expressed in Woolf's notes for the novel, where above a drawing of an
"H" shape she wrote 'two blocks joined by a corridor.' [2] During this period Britain begins and
finishes fighting World War I. In addition, the reader is informed as to the fates of a number
of characters introduced in the first part of the novel: Mrs Ramsay passes away, Prue dies
from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift
without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of mortal fear and his anguish
over doubts regarding his self worth.
Part III: The Lighthouse
In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays return to their
summer home ten years after the events of Part I, as Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the
long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip
almost doesn’t happen, as the children hadn't been ready, but they eventually take off. En
route, the children give their father the silent treatment for forcing them to come along.
James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has
come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy
between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father has changed as well.
They are being accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish
during the trip. The son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait,
throwing the injured fish back into the sea.
While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished
painting. She reconsiders Mrs Ramsay’s memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to
continue with her art, yet at the same time struggling to free herself from the tacit control Mrs
Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it
satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the
idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.
Major themes
Complexity of experience
Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but
rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of
looking. In order to be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, the author would
spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and
emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw.
Narration and perspective
The novel lacks an omniscient narrator ] (--> except in the second section: Time
Passes) ; instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of
consciousness. This lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no
clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we
formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous.
Whereas in Part I the novel is concerned with illustrating the relationship between the
character experiencing and the actual experience and surroundings, the second part, 'Time
Passes' having no characters to relate to, presents events differently. Instead, Woolf wrote
the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending
that events be seen related to time. For that reason the narrating voice is unfocused and
distorted, providing an example of what Woolf called 'life as it is when we have no part in it.
Allusions to actual geography
Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father and probably the model for Mr Ramsay, began renting
Talland House in St Ives in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the
family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The location of the main
story in To the Lighthouse, Hebridean island and the house there, was formed by Woolf in
imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story,
including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the lighthouse.
Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house after the war, the
Stephens had given up the house by that time. After the war, Virginia Woolf along with her
sister Vanessa visited Talland House under its new ownership, and again later, long after her
parents were dead, Woolf repeated the
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a
day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to
be one of Woolf's best-known novels, owing in part to the popularity of Michael
Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, and Stephen Daldry's movie
adaptation of the same name.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The
Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to
be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in
time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life
and of the inter-war social structure.
Plot summary
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party
that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about
her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic
Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from
India that day.
Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War One, spends his day in the park with his wife
Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He is taken to two
doctors and is prescribed a stay in the country. When a doctor arrives to take him away, he
jumps out a window and kills himself.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the
characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about
Septimus's suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she
considers an effort to preserve his own happiness.
Style
In Mrs Dalloway, all the action except flashbacks takes place on a single day in June.
It is a popular example of stream of consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks
the momentary thoughts of a particular character. The third-person limited narration follows
at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa
Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to
be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often hailed as one of the greatest
novels of the twentieth century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's masterpiece (the Hogarth
Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, turned down the chance to publish the novel in
England).
Themes
Feminism
As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of
women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic
repression. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a
politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws.
Sally Seton, who Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent
woman: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and
made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in
the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had
five sons.
Homosexuality
Clarissa Dalloway was strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- twenty years later, she
still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about
women "as men feel", but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life
passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kiss her on the lips. The whole
world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And
she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a
diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and
down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)
Septimus Smith might also be gay. He obsesses over the fallen Evans, he feels no
real love for his wife, and his sense of guilt has elements in common with homosexual panic.
Doris Kilman could also be seen as gay, for her affinity to Mrs. Dalloway's daughter
Elizabeth.
Mental illness
Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the
treatment of insanity and depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through
Septimus's decline and ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his
condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he
can make them.
Similarities in Septimus's condition to Woolf's own struggles with manic depression
(they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself
out of a window as Septimus finally does) lead many to read a strongly auto-biographical
aspect into Septimus's character. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
Existential issues
When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes
that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By
focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of
private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in
Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads.
Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who
appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and
create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of
joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She interprets
Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when
she figures out her marriage is a lie.
Virginia Woolf
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an
English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of
the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society
and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay
A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement
with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The
Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and
Company Ltd.
This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the
draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise
DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that
many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.
Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and
popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has
been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost
Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her
works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as
well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War
II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s.
After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was
anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her
stature as a novelist.
Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class
English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without
the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned
common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an antiSemite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the
Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth
quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's
Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob
I was, for they have immense vitality."
Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central
strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are
highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and
sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism
and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual
impressions.
The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal
settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway
(1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a
working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep
psychological scars.
To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around
the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the
connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the
creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of
the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in
the midst of war, and of the people left behind.
To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. The freely, multiply
discursive tale centers on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland
between 1910 and 1920.
To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel
Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the
prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no
action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of
childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the
book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.
Plot summary
Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye.
The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring James that they should be able to visit the
lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty
that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr and
Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to
on various occasions throughout the chapter, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs
Ramsay's relationship.
The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues,
one of them being Lily Briscoe who begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter
attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by
doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley,
another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer
of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises.
The section closes with a large dinner party. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus
Carmichael, a visiting poet, when the latter asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay,
who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta
Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to
dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.
Part II: Time Passes
The second section is employed by the author to give a sense of time passing. Woolf
explained the purpose of this section, writing that it was 'an interesting experiment [that
gave] the sense of ten years passing.' [1]. This section's role in linking the two dominant parts
of the story was also expressed in Woolf's notes for the novel, where above a drawing of an
"H" shape she wrote 'two blocks joined by a corridor.' [2] During this period Britain begins and
finishes fighting World War I. In addition, the reader is informed as to the fates of a number
of characters introduced in the first part of the novel: Mrs Ramsay passes away, Prue dies
from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift
without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of mortal fear and his anguish
over doubts regarding his self worth.
Part III: The Lighthouse
In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays return to their
summer home ten years after the events of Part I, as Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the
long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip
almost doesn’t happen, as the children hadn't been ready, but they eventually take off. En
route, the children give their father the silent treatment for forcing them to come along.
James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has
come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy
between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father has changed as well.
They are being accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish
during the trip. The son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait,
throwing the injured fish back into the sea.
While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished
painting. She reconsiders Mrs Ramsay’s memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to
continue with her art, yet at the same time struggling to free herself from the tacit control Mrs
Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it
satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the
idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.
Major themes
Complexity of experience
Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but
rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of
looking. In order to be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, the author would
spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and
emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw.
Narration and perspective
The novel lacks an omniscient narrator ] (--> except in the second section: Time
Passes) ; instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of
consciousness. This lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no
clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we
formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous.
Whereas in Part I the novel is concerned with illustrating the relationship between the
character experiencing and the actual experience and surroundings, the second part, 'Time
Passes' having no characters to relate to, presents events differently. Instead, Woolf wrote
the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending
that events be seen related to time. For that reason the narrating voice is unfocused and
distorted, providing an example of what Woolf called 'life as it is when we have no part in it.
Allusions to actual geography
Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father and probably the model for Mr Ramsay, began renting
Talland House in St Ives in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the
family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The location of the main
story in To the Lighthouse, Hebridean island and the house there, was formed by Woolf in
imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story,
including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the lighthouse.
Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house after the war, the
Stephens had given up the house by that time. After the war, Virginia Woolf along with her
sister Vanessa visited Talland House under its new ownership, and again later, long after her
parents were dead, Woolf repeated the
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a
day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to
be one of Woolf's best-known novels, owing in part to the popularity of Michael
Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, and Stephen Daldry's movie
adaptation of the same name.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The
Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to
be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in
time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life
and of the inter-war social structure.
Plot summary
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party
that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about
her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic
Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from
India that day.
Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War One, spends his day in the park with his wife
Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He is taken to two
doctors and is prescribed a stay in the country. When a doctor arrives to take him away, he
jumps out a window and kills himself.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the
characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about
Septimus's suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she
considers an effort to preserve his own happiness.
Style
In Mrs Dalloway, all the action except flashbacks takes place on a single day in June.
It is a popular example of stream of consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks
the momentary thoughts of a particular character. The third-person limited narration follows
at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa
Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to
be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often hailed as one of the greatest
novels of the twentieth century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's masterpiece (the Hogarth
Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, turned down the chance to publish the novel in
England).
Themes
Feminism
As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of
women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic
repression. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a
politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws.
Sally Seton, who Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent
woman: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and
made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in
the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had
five sons.
Homosexuality
Clarissa Dalloway was strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- twenty years later, she
still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about
women "as men feel", but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life
passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kiss her on the lips. The whole
world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And
she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a
diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and
down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)
Septimus Smith might also be gay. He obsesses over the fallen Evans, he feels no
real love for his wife, and his sense of guilt has elements in common with homosexual panic.
Doris Kilman could also be seen as gay, for her affinity to Mrs. Dalloway's daughter
Elizabeth.
Mental illness
Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the
treatment of insanity and depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through
Septimus's decline and ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his
condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he
can make them.
Similarities in Septimus's condition to Woolf's own struggles with manic depression
(they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself
out of a window as Septimus finally does) lead many to read a strongly auto-biographical
aspect into Septimus's character. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
Existential issues
When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes
that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By
focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of
private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in
Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads.
Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who
appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and
create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of
joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She interprets
Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when
she figures out her marriage is a lie.
Virginia Woolf
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an
English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of
the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society
and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay
A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement
with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The
Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and
Company Ltd.
This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the
draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise
DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that
many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.
Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and
popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has
been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost
Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her
works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as
well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War
II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s.
After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was
anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her
stature as a novelist.
Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class
English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without
the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned
common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an antiSemite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the
Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth
quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's
Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob
I was, for they have immense vitality."
Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central
strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are
highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and
sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism
and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual
impressions.
The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal
settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway
(1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to
organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a
working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep
psychological scars.
To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around
the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the
connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the
creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of
the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in
the midst of war, and of the people left behind.
