History of English Literature II.

Lecture 3
PaedDr. Puskás Andrea, PhD.

“Life is not a series of gig lamps

symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.”(V. W.)

“Mental fight means thinking against the

current, not with it. It is our business to
puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of
truth.” (V. W.)

Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

(LODGE, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the
Typology of Modern Literature. Edward Arnold)

Her novels demonstrate the break with the traditional novel.

Traditional novel:
 rounded characters
 logical plot
 specific setting
 the author’s voice: strong, explaining, narrating, guaranteeing,
 unified and coherent narrative

Modern novel:
 the author’s voice fades away, the discourse locates itself in the minds of the
characters with limited knowledge and understanding
 unity and coherence are undermined by the repetition of motifs and symbols,
metaphors, similes

David Lodge:
If we compare the writing of Woolf with the writing of Joyce, his aspired to the condition of
myth, hers aspired to the condition of lyrical poetry.

Woolf does not imitate experience, but questions it – searching for the meaning of life,
analysing death – life is always threatened by death
Her early life was darkened by a series of deaths in her immediate family – the unexpected
deaths of her mother, her half-sister Stella and her brother Thoby.
Virginia suffered from mental illness and eventually she committed suicide.

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Her novels are concerned with the question of the meaning of life, and all involve the sudden,
premature deaths of one or more of the major characters – e.g. Septimus Smith in Mrs
Dalloway.
 her answer: either life is meaningless or death makes it so
 she concentrates on personal, subjective experience

Virginia Woolf’s major novels: Mrs Dalloway

To the Lighthouse
The Waves
Orlando
Jacob’s Room
 almost all of them are about sensitive people living from one privileged moment to the
next, passing through intervening periods of dissatisfaction, depression and doubt
 the novels are essentially plotless – their endings are false endings or non-endings,
which leave the characters exactly where they have always been, living inside their
heads – between joy and despair until they die
 each character’s consciousness is rendered in interior monologues of uniform style

Virginia Woolf’s critics usually describe Jacob’s Room as her first truly experimental novel.
 she experiments with the technique of the stream of consciousness
 the novel is really about the difficulty of writing a novel, of truly representing a
person in the written word: “It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable
force. They say that novelists never catch it.”

Woolf had an interesting correspondence about aesthetics with the painter Jacques Raverat at
the time when she was working on Mrs Dalloway. He suggested that writing, as an artistic
medium, was limited by being “essentially linear”, unable therefore to render the complex
multiplicity of a mental event, which he compared to a pebble cast into a pond, “splashes in
the outer air in every direction, and under the surface waves that follow one and other into
forgotten corners”. Virginia Woolf replied that it was precisely her aim to go beyond “the
formal railway line of the sentence” and to disregard the “falsity of the past”.

Woolf abandoned the linear narrative structure and preferred the stream of consciousness 
the chronological order of events was subordinated to rendering the impression they made on
the individual consciousness.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882.

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."

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister
Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. She was,
however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and
history at the Ladies’ Department of King's College London between 1897 and 1901, and this
brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education
The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly
institutionalised.

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Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested[5] her
breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual
abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers. Throughout
her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. She spent three
short periods in 1910, 1912 and 1913 at Burley House, 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham,
described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder".[6] Though this
instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks
throughout her life.
After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian
sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-
Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry, who together
formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury
Group.
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on the 10th August, 1912.[8] Despite his low
material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a "penniless Jew") the
couple shared a close bond.

Mrs. Dalloway
The novel details a day in the life of Clarissa
Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in
post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's
best-known novels.
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 an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-
war social structure. In 2005, Mrs Dalloway was included on Time magazine's list of the 100
best English-language novels written since 1923.
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 spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes
her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of
the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh and she "had not the option" to be with Sally
Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.
Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I suffering from deferred traumatic stress,
spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where they are observed by
Peter Walsh. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly
concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is
prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping
out of a window.
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' suicide at the

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party and gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger, which she considers an effort to
preserve the purity of his happiness.
In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It
is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the
momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction
between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of
narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy.[3] The
narration follows at least twenty characters in this way but the bulk of the novel is spent with
Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Themes
The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters (Clarissa Dalloway
and Septimus Smith); within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that
the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, the "continuous present"
(Gertrude Stein's phrase) of her charmed youth
at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on
this day in London. For Septimus, the
"continuous present" of his time as a soldier
during the Great War keeps intruding,
especially in the form of Evans, his fallen
comrade.
- mental illness
- feminism
- homosexuality
- existential issues

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the
Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset
of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception
given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was
unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones,
and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not
found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the
garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
In her last note to her husband she wrote:
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't
go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover
this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am
doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the
greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that
anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been
happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I
know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could
work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this
properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the
happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with
me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it.
If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.

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Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your
life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Major Works of Short Fiction

In her short fiction Woolf typically focused on minute physical detail and experimented with
stream-of-consciousness techniques, interior monologue, and symbolism to capture the
subjective workings of human thought. “Kew Gardens” typifies her lyrical portrayal of
varied narrative perspectives through the interior monologue of an omniscient narrator. In
this seemingly plotless story, Woolf creates the atmosphere of an afternoon at London's Kew
Gardens by fusing the shifting points of view of several people with those of a snail, insects,
flowers, and even such inanimate objects as buses and airplanes. In “Mark on the Wall” she
employs interior monologue to impart the musings of a narrator who, in speculating about a
small detail on a wall, ponders a variety of topics, including personal reminiscence, history,
and nature. Every rumination returns to the mark only to stray anew into reverie, as each of
the narrator's seemingly meandering thoughts builds upon one another to create an intricate
discourse on the nature of reality and truth.
Themes in Woolf's short fiction are intrinsically fused with narrative form. Similar to Joyce's
short stories, in which epiphany is frequently an essential element, Woolf's short fiction often
depends on “moments of being” to delineate themes. Whereas Joyce's notion of epiphany
focuses on the power of a single event to reveal truth, Woolf's “moments of being” encompass
various incursions into time and place. In “Moments of Being: ‘Slater's Pins Have No
Points,’” the protagonist, Fanny Wilmot, searches for a lost pin while she simultaneously
attempts to gain insight into the personality of her elderly piano teacher, Julia Craye. In the
brief time she searches for the pin, Fanny juxtaposes thoughts about Julia's past with the
present and speculates on Julia's happiness. The narrative returns after each rumination
about Julia's life to Fanny's search for the pin until, finally, at the instant when Fanny finds the
pin, she experiences the revelation that Julia is indeed happy.
Woolf's fascination with the elusive nature of storytelling, as well as the inherent difficulty of
knowing character, provided subject matter for several of her short stories. In “An Unwritten
Novel” she explored this theme through the capricious mind of the narrator as she rides a train
with a stranger, observing details of the unknown woman's appearance and behaviour to
construct a story surrounding her life. At the end of the tale the narrator is stunned to realize
that her conclusions are utterly incorrect. In this and in several other stories, Woolf overturned
conventional Edwardian precepts that relied on observable details to discern veracity and
illustrated the unknowable nature of truth and character. In both her fiction and nonfiction
Woolf was devoted to raising the social consciousness of readers. Her disarming and often
humorous feminist works are informed with pointed criticism of sexism, as well as praise for
neglected women writers. For example, “A Society” highlights ten years in the lives of a
group of women who meet regularly to question conventions of art, literature, scholarship,
law, and military achievement in a male-dominated society. One of the group's vows is to
forego having children until they have resolved their questions. However, when one woman,
Castilia, becomes pregnant, a new resolution is adopted to allow only the unchaste into their
society, and Castilia is appointed president. The story's ironic stance, humour, and extensive
use of allusion to the Bible and mythology serve, for several critics, to elevate it above the
level of polemic.

Critical Reception
Like her contemporary James Joyce, with whom she is often compared, critics argue that
Woolf revolted against the traditional narrative methods of her time and experimented
with stream-of-consciousness prose and interior monologue. They note that she first

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introduced many of these formal experiments in short stories that often present “moments of
being”—instances of intense sensibility during which disparate thoughts and events culminate
in a flash of insight. Recent critical studies of Woolf's short fiction have investigated the
symbolism of mirrors and glass in her work, traced revisions of her stories.
Commentators have discussed her as a lesbian writer, and have emphasized parallels between
her lesbian-themed stories with those of Gertrude Stein. Most critics acknowledge that
Woolf's short stories frequently served as experimental studies in which ideas for her longer
works of fiction originated and developed. Yet many commentators have contended that
Woolf's experiments with poetic style, her psychological focus, and her subjective point of
view expanded the limits of time and perception within the framework of the short story,
influencing and contributing significantly to the development of modern short fiction.