Woolf, Virginia - Mrs Dalloway (7)

Virginia Woolf

Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf grew up in an intellectual and distinguished environment.
She was educated at home with her sister, Vanessa, but she came into contact with many yough intellectual of a group, known as the "Bloomsbury Group".
Virginia herself was dedicated to the feminist movement in order, for example, to obtain the votes for women.
Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a lovely man who always try to help his wife.

Her main famous works are: Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927)

Mrs Dalloway

The plot of this work is very simple: all the events in this short novel take place in one single day in June 1923. The novel begins in the morning, when Clarissa Dalloway goes out to buy some flowers for a dinner party in her house and the novel endings when the party ends, close to midnight.
The main plot of the story however is rich in incident, such minor, such serious like the suicide of the young war veteran Septimus W. Smith.
During the party another event is important: the surprise visit from Clarissa's old fame, Peter.
These incidents, thoughts and memories all takes place around or inside the character of Clarissa who is the common link between characters, events and memories. By the end of the novel the reader feels closer to Mrs Dalloway and Peter as this day, in bringing them together once more.

Mrs Dalloway is a typical modernist novel: perceptions, thoughts, memories and feelings of the main characters are expressed by the stream of consciousness, as in the work of James Joyce Ulysses. Another important similitude with Joyce is the brevity of the tells: both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway last only one day.
Woolf uses always a conventional grammar and punctuation. She uses indirect interior mologue for each characters rather then complete stream of consciousness.
There is also an omniscient narrator who acts as a link between the characters to guide the reader.