Virginia Woolf Essays

Between the Acts

Ms. La Trobe says it best in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts: 'This is death, death, death - when illusion fails.' (p. 180) Various characters in the novel create illusions to escape from the reality that grieves them. And those illusions are...

Mrs. Dalloway

Each individual has an outward part of her personality that is revealed to others and an inward part which is kept solely to herself. Consequently, there is a contrast between the appearance of a person and the reality of whom that person really...

Mrs. Dalloway

'Clarissa could not be wider of the mark when she "thank(s) heaven" that "the war was over". Virtually every character we encounter is to some degree a living casualty of the class-based superficiality that led to the conflict and continues to...

Mrs. Dalloway

What is the novel about?

"Mrs Dalloway" is a novel so rich and complex in its imagery, and the issues to which it gives rise are so many and so varied, that to assign one distinctly defined meaning to it, as one might for a Victorian or Edwardian...

Mrs. Dalloway

Elsewhere some Hindus were drumming - he knew they were Hindus, because the rhythm was uncongenial to him. (E.M. Forster, A Passage to India)

While writing and revising Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf was corresponding with E.M. Forster, who was...

Mrs. Dalloway

After Septimus' suicide, we encounter Peter Walsh hearing the "light, high bell of the ambulance," and deeming it, in his mind, "one of the triumphs of civilization" (151). He ponders the "efficiency, organization, the communal spirit," of the...

Mrs. Dalloway

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent. . . therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

—John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

The year is 1923. In the suburbs of London,...

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about time: its quality, its depth, and its composition. Woolf conveys the complexity of time by drawing attention to her characters’ unique struggles to create meaning for themselves within the confines...

Mrs. Dalloway

Critic Bradbury states that “With light taxation, no inflation, cheap food, cheap labour, a plentiful supply of domestic servants, many ordinary middle class families with modest incomes lived full and comfortable lives. No wonder that so many who...

Mrs. Dalloway

Among the many themes explored in The Hours is the effect that certain pivotal moments have on our lives. The first and most obvious of these moments is described in the prologue: Virginia weighs herself down with stones and walks into the river....