In her novel Between the Acts, Virginia Wolf explores the dichotomy that arises when two entirely separate social classes live under one roof together. Likewise, Jamaica Kincaid gives an intimate portrayal of a young au pair working in a wealthy,...

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...

Ian McEwan’s Atonement draws inspiration from and alludes to a vast number of 20th century modernist authors and works, both stylistically and thematically. For a novel to be considered a successful culmination to the reading of a large body of...

Alexandra Harris claims in Romantic Moderns that to plant flowers in the middle of a war was to assert one’s firm belief in the future. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the first world war, and her final novel...

Somewhere within the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, there seems to lie what could be understood as a restatement - or, perhaps, a working out of - the essentially simple, key theme or motif found in Woolf's famous feminist essay A Room of One's Own....

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...

'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...

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...

Mention Virginia Woolf and almost inevitably the words 'stream of consciousness' will appear. But what does this actually mean, and how does Woolf distance herself from both reader and Clarissa, and, indeed, does she bother? Mrs Dalloway is, we...

In any story, conflict is vital. It drives forth plot and reveals truths about the characters involved, keeping readers engaged. It also reflects the world of its writer, who often uses conflict as a tool to illustrate personal ideas. This is...

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...

It is neither unique nor uncommon for great authors to weave themselves into the fabric of their own works; it is a technique that adds realism and believability to otherwise complex fictional characters. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and...

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...

In "The Book of the Grosteques," the first story of his novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson introduces the concept of the “grotesque.” This concept sets up the following stories in the novel, and can also be seen in other modernist texts...

Virginia Woolf’s answer to Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical pursuits in To the Lighthouse is a reconciliation of both worlds – subjective perception and interpretation, and external objectivity. The first chapter of the novel is entitled “The Window,”...

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is known for its flowing, stream-of-consciousness narrative form that connects external events and the thoughts of all of the characters. Ironically, one of the novel’s most prominent themes is that of...

“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,...

Eric Auerbach writes in Mimesis that one of the characteristics of the realistic novel of the era between the two world wars is the multi-personal representations of consciousness. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, the...

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...

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...

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....

Alexandra Harris claims in Romantic Moderns that to plant flowers in the middle of a war was to assert one’s firm belief in the future. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the first world war, and her final novel...

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches… they had to be together,...

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway uses themes that scrutinize the environment of interwar England, which inhibited the ability to effectively communicate one’s thoughts and feelings, because the cultural norm dismissed them in favor of keeping...