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English Writer Virginia Woolf became famous for her nonlinear prose style, especially noted in her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Quotes
"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." — Virginia Woolf
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| Virginia Woolf |
Synopsis
Born into a privileged English household in 1882, writer Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Her nonlinear, free-form prose style inspired her peers and earned her much praise. She was also known for her mood swings and bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.
Early Life
English writer Virginia Woolf was raised in a remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an historian and author, and also one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf's mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (nee Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Woolf had three full siblings and four half-siblings; both of her parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. The eight children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Two of Woolf's brothers had been educated at Cambridge, but all the girls were taught at home and utilized the splendid confines of the family's lush Victorian library. Moreover, Woolf's parents were extremely well-connected, both socially and artistically. Her father was a friend to William Thackeray and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other noted thinkers. Her mother's aunt was the famous 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. For these reasons and more, Virginia Woolf was ideally situated to appreciate and experiment with the art of writing.
From the time of her birth, on January 25, 1882, until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and has a view of the Godrevy lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).
As a young girl, Virginia was light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, to document her family's humorous anecdotes. She had, however, been traumatized at the age of six when her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth sexually abuse her. This dark spot was only made deeper and more permanent when her mother suddenly died at the age of 49. The hormones of early adolescence and the undeniable reality of this huge loss spun Woolf into a nervous breakdown, only made worse when two years later, her half-sister Stella also died.
Despite her misery; Woolf managed to take classes in German, Greek and Latin at the Ladies' Department of King's College London. Her four years of study introduced her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In 1904, her father died. His passing was climactic; during this time she was institutionalized. Virginia Woolf's dance between literary expression and personal desolation would continue for the rest of her life.
When Virginia was in her early 20s, her sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. Through her siblings' connections, Virginia became acquainted with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists who became famous in 1910 for their Dreadnought hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought. Woolf disguised herself as a bearded man. After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf, a writer and a member of the group, took a fancy to Virginia. By 1912, she and Leonard were married. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives.
Early Literary Fiction
Virginia Stephen determined in 1908 to re-form the novel by creating a holistic form embracing aspects of life that were 'fugitive' from the Victorian novel. While writing anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, she experimented with such a novel, which she called Melymbrosia. In November 1910, Roger Fry, a new friend of the Bells, launched the exhibit "Manet and the Post-Impressionists," which introduced radical European art to the London bourgeoisie. Virginia was at once outraged over the attention that painting garnered and intrigued by the possibility of borrowing from the likes of artists Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. As Clive Bell was unfaithful, Vanessa began an affair with Fry, and Fry began a lifelong debate with Virginia about the visual and verbal arts. In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East. After he resigned from the colonial service, Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. She continued to work on her first novel; he wrote the anticolonialist novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), a Bloomsbury expose. Then he became a political writer and an advocate for peace and justice.
Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia's mental health was precarious. Nevertheless, she completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. She based many of her novel's characters on real-life prototypes: Lytton Strachey, Leslie Stephen, her half-brother George Duckworth, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and herself. Rachel Vinrace, the novel's central character, is a sheltered young woman who, on an excursion to South America, is introduced to freedom and sexuality (though from the novel's inception, she was to die before marrying). Woolf first made Terence, Rachel's suitor, rather Clive-like; as she revised, Terence became a more sensitive, Leonard-like character. After an excursion up the Amazon, Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death.
As possible causes for this disaster, Woolf's characters suggest everything from poorly washed vegetables to jungle disease to a malevolent universe, but the book endorses no explanation. That indeterminacy, at odds with the certainties of the Victorian era, is echoed in descriptions that distort perception: while the narrative often describes people, buildings, and natural objects as featureless forms, Rachel, in dreams and then delirium, journeys into surrealistic worlds. Rachel s voyage into the unknown began Woolf's voyage beyond the conventions of realism.
Woolf's manic-depressive worries (that she was a failure as a writer and a woman, that she was despised by Vanessa and unloved by Leonard) provoked a suicide attempt in September 1913. Publication of The Voyage Out was delayed until early 1915; then, that April, she sank into a distressed state in which she was often delirious. Later that year she overcame the "vile imaginations" that had threatened her sanity. She kept the demons of mania and depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life.
In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press, named for Hogarth House, their home in the London suburbs. The Woolfs themselves (she was the compositor while he worked the press) published their own Tiuo Stories in the summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard's Three Jews and Virginia's The Mark on the Wall, the latter about contemplation itself.
Since 1910, Virginia had kept (sometimes with Vanessa) a country house in Sussex, and in 1916 Vanessa settled into a Sussex farmhouse called Charleston. She had ended her affair with Fry to take up with the painter Duncan Grant, who moved to Charleston with Vanessa and her children, Julian and Quentin Bell; a daughter, Angelica, would be born to Vanessa and Grant at the end of 1918. Charleston soon became an extravagantly decorated, unorthodox retreat for artists and writers, especially Clive Bell, who continued on friendly terms with Vanessa, and Fry; Vanessa's lifelong devotee.
Virginia had kept a diary; off and on, since 1897. In 1919 she envisioned "the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to," organized not by a mechanical recording of events but by the interplay between the objective and the subjective. Her diary, as she wrote in 1924, would reveal people as "splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes." Such terms later inspired critical distinctions, based on anatomy and culture, between the feminine and the masculine, the feminine being a varied but all-embracing way of experiencing the world and the masculine a monolithic or linear way. Critics using these distinctions have credited Woolf with evolving a distinctly feminine diary form, one that explores, with perception, honesty and humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self.
Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it, she plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles, with its protagonist Katharine in both. Night and Day (1919) answers Leonard's The Wise Virgins, in which he had his Leonard-like protagonist lose the Virginia- like beloved and end up in a conventional marriage. In Night and Day, the Leonard-like Ralph learns to value Katharine for herself, not as some superior being. And Katharine overcomes (as Virginia had) class and familial prejudices to marry the good and intelligent Ralph. This novel focuses on the very sort of details that Woolf had deleted from The Voyage Out: credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings, and investigations of issues such as class, politics, and suffrage.
Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918. Her essay "Modern Novels" (1919; revised in 1925 as "Modern Fiction") attacked the "materialists" who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or "luminous" experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell's illustrations, Virginia's Kew Gardens (1919), a story organized, like a Post-Impressionistic painting, by pattern. With the Hogarth Press's emergence as a major publishing house, the Woolf's gradually ceased being their own printers.
In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk's House, which looked out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows where the River Ouse wound down to the English Channel. Virginia could walk or bicycle to visit Vanessa, her children, and a changing cast of guests at the bohemian Charleston and then retreat to Monk's House to write. She envisioned a new book that would apply the theories of "Modern Novels" and the achievements of her short stories to the novel form. In early 1920 a group of friends, evolved from the early Bloomsbury group, began a "Memoir Club," which met to read irreverent passages from their autobiographies. Her second presentation was an expose of Victorian hypocrisy; especially that of George Duckworth, who masked inappropriate, unwanted caresses as affection honoring their mother's memory.
In 1921 Woolf's minimally plotted short fiction were gathered in Monday or Tuesday. Meanwhile, typesetting having heightened her sense of visual layout, she began a new novel written in blocks to be surrounded by white spaces. In "On Re-Reading Novels" (1922), Woolf argued that the novel was not so much a form but an "emotion which you feel." In Jacob's Room (1922) she achieved such emotion, transforming personal grief over the death of Thoby Stephen into a "spiritual shape." Though she takes Jacob from childhood to his early death in war, she leaves out plot, conflict, even character. The emptiness of Jacob's room and the irrelevance of his belongings convey in their minimalism the profound emptiness of loss. Though Jacob's Room is an antiwar novel, Woolf feared that she had ventured too far beyond representation. She vowed to "push on," as she wrote Clive Bellr to graft such experimental techniques onto more-substantial characters.
Major Literary Works
At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a foiling device that would pair that highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr. Smith, so that "the sane and the insane" would exist "side by side. " Her aim was to "tunnel" into these two characters until Clarissa Dalloway's affirmations meet Septimus Smith's negations. Also in 1924, Woolf gave a talk at Cambridge called "Character in Fiction," revised later that year as the Hogarth Press pamphlet Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In it she celebrated the breakdown in patriarchal values that had occurred "in or about December, 1910" —during Fry's exhibit "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" — and she attacked "materialist" novelists for omitting the essence of character.
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the boorish doctors presume to understand personality, but its essence evades them. This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa's and Septimus's movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives come together when the doctor who was treating (or, rather, mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa's party with news of the death. The main characters are connected by motifs and, finally; by Clarissa's intuiting why Septimus threw his life away.
Woolf wished to build on her achievement in Mrs. Dalloway by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy; To the Lighthouse—published on May 5, 1927, the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen's death —evoked childhood summers at Tailand House. As a novel, it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure. The first section, "The Window,'' begins as Mrs. Ramsay and James, her youngest son—like Julia and Adrian Stephen—sit in the French window of the Ramsays' summer home while a houseguest named Lily Briscoe paints them and James begs to go to a nearby lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay; like Leslie Stephen, sees poetry as didacticism, conversation as winning points, and life as a tally of accomplishments.
He uses logic to deflate hopes for a trip to the lighthouse, but he needs sympathy from his wife. She is more attuned to emotions than reason. In the climactic dinner-party scene, she inspires such harmony and composure that the moment "partook, she felt,...of eternity." The novel's middle "Time Passes" section focuses on the empty house during a 10-year hiatus and the last-minute housecleaning for the returning Ramsays. Woolf describes the progress of weeds, mold, dust, and gusts of wind, but she merely announces such major events as the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and a son and daughter. In the novel's third section, "The Lighthouse," Woolf brings Mr. Ramsay, his youngest children (James and Cam), Lily Briscoe, and others from "The Window" back to the house. As Mr. Ramsay and the now-teenage children reach the lighthouse and achieve a moment of reconciliation, Lily completes her painting. To the Lighthousemelds into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art. Lily argues effectively for non-representation of all but emotive art, and her painting (in which mother and child are reduced to two shapes with a line between them) echoes the abstract structure of Woolf's profoundly elegiac novel.
In two 1927 essays, "The Art of Fiction" and "The New Biography," she wrote that fiction writers should be less concerned with naive notions of reality and more with language and design. However restricted by fact, she argued, biographers should yoke truth with imagination, "granite-like solidity" with "rainbow-like intangibility." Their relationship has cooled by 1927, Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West through a "biography" that would include Sackville family history. Woolf solved biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando, who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the ensuing centuries returns to the poem "The Oak Tree," revising it according to shifting poetic conventions. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Thus, Orlando: A Biography (1928) exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. However fantastic, Orlando also argues for a novelistic approach to biography.
In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told Woolf that her memoir "on George," presented to the Memoir Club that year or a year earlier represented her best writing. Afterward, she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf blamed women's absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty. For her 1931 talk "Professions for Women," Woolf studied the history of women's education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society. She urged women to destroy the "angel in the house," a reference to Coventry Patmore's poem of that title, the quintessential Victorian paean to women who sacrifice themselves to men.
Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa Bell's paintings for their wordlessness, Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be similarly impersonal and abstract. In The Waves (1931), poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk. Between the interludes, the voices of six named characters appear in sections that move from their childhood to old age. In the middle section, when the six friends meet at a farewell dinner for another friend leaving for India, the single flower at the center of the dinner table becomes a "seven-sided flower...a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution." The Waves offers a six-sided shape that illustrates how each individual experiences events — including their friend's death—uniquely. Bernard, the writer in the group, narrates the final section, defying death and a world "without a self." Unique though they are (and their prototypes can be identified in the Bloomsbury group), the characters become one, just as the sea and sky become indistinguishable in the interludes.
This oneness with all creation was the primal experience Woolf had felt as a child in Cornwall. In this her most experimental novel, she achieved its poetic equivalent. Through To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Woolf became, with James Joyce and William Faulkner, one of the three major English- language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing.
The Voyage Out (1915), Woolf's first novel, is told in the conventional narrative manner, but with a concentration of interest upon character and a delicacy of touch typical of all her work. The same emphasis on character analysis and the same lack of incident characterize Night and Day (1919), another study of personal adjustment and development. Then came her first really mature work, Jacob's Room (1922), in which her distinctive technique is fully used for the first time. By a series of disconnected impressions, revealed mainly through the consciousness of people with whom he came into contact, we are made aware of the personality of Jacob. These momentary impressions, which shift and dissolve with the bewildering inconsequence of real mental processes, are revealed by the use of the internal monologue, and from them, we are intended to build up gradually a complete conception of the young man. This same method, handled with greater firmness, is again used in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Though what little event' there is occupies only one day, Virginia Woolf is enabled to create not only the lives of her chief characters, which are studied with a penetrating subtlety, but even the London background. To the Lighthouse (1927) shows a still firmer mastery of the 'stream of consciousness' technique, and is by many accounted her finest work. Its study of the relationships of the members of the Romney family achieves a greater artistic unity than is found in her previous novels, and yet preserves all her usual subtlety of analysis. The ultimate development of her method appears in The Waves (1931), from which plot, in the normally accepted sense, is almost entirely lacking. It is a symbolic work of great poetic beauty, in which the consciousness of the six characters is studied in a series of internal monologues. An ambitious, and clearly an experimental, work, it is remarkable for its sensitive perception of changing moods, and the skill with which the six characters are distinguished. It has been well described as a prose poem. Flush (1933), The Years (1937), in which she again deals with family relationships, and the unfinished Between the Acts (1941) shows her usual delicacy of touch and brilliant technical mastery, but the first two fall below the level of her major works, while of the last it is difficult to attempt an assessment.
Standing alone among Woolf's novels, and therefore last to be considered here, the fantasy, Orlando, a Biography (1928), which may be said to have established her reputation with the wider reading public. With a verve and spirit utterly different from the movement of her other novels, it traces from Elizabethan to modern times the life of Orlando, who not only appears as a number of different people, but even changes sex in the middle of the story. It is full of vivid color and striking evocations of historical periods and settings.
Late Work
From her earliest days, Woolf had framed experience in terms of oppositions, even while she longed for a holistic state beyond binary divisions. The "perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow" Woolf described in her essay "The New Biography" typified her approach during the 1930s to individual works and to a balance between writing works of fact and of imagination. Even before finishing The Waves, she began compiling a scrapbook of clippings illustrating the horrors of war, the threat of fascism, and the oppression of women. The discrimination against women that Woolf had discussed in A Room of One's Own and ''Professions for Women" inspired her to plan a book that would trace the story of a fictional family named Pargiter and explain the social conditions affecting family members over a period of time. In The Parbiters: A Novel-Essay she would alternate between sections of fiction and of fact. For the fictional historical narrative, she relied upon experiences of friends and family from the Victorian Age to the 1930s. For the essays, she researched that 50-year span of history. The task, however, of moving between fiction and fact was daunting.
Woolf took a holiday from The Pargiters to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lytton Strachey having recently died, Woolf muted her spoof of his biographical method; nevertheless, Flush (1933) remains both a biographical satire and a lighthearted exploration of perception, in this case a dog's. In 1935 Woolf completed Freshwater, an absurdist drama based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Featuring such o ther eminences as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the painter George Frederick Watts, this riotous play satirizes high-minded Victorian notions of art.
Meanwhile, Woolf feared she would never finish The Pargiters. Alternating between types of prose was proving cumbersome, and the book was becoming too long. She solved this dilemma by jettisoning the essay sections, keeping the family narrative, and renaming her book The Years. She narrated 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism, and the threat of another war. Desperate to finish, Woolf lightened the book with poetic echoes of gestures, objects, colours, and sounds and with wholesale deletions, cutting epiphanies for Eleanor Pargiter and explicit references to women's bodies. The novel illustrates the damage done to women and society over the years by sexual repression, ignorance, and discrimination. Though (or perhaps because) Woolf's trimming muted the book's radicalism, The Years (1937) became a best seller.
When Fry died in 1934, Virginia was distressed; Vanessa was devastated. Then in July 1937 Vanessa's elder son, Julian Bell, was killed in the Spanish Civil War while driving an ambulance for the Republican army. Vanessa was so disconsolate that Virginia put aside her writing for a time to try to comfort her sister. Privately a lament over Julian's death and publicly a diatribe against war, Three Guineas (1938) proposes answers to the question of how to prevent war. Woolf connected masculine symbols of authority with militarism and misogyny, an argument buttressed by notes from her clippings about aggression, fascism, and war.
Still distressed by the deaths of Roger Fry and Julian Bell, she determined to test her theories about experimental, novelistic biography in a life of Fry. As she acknowledged in "The Art of Biography" (1939), the recalcitrance of evidence brought her near despair over the possibility of writing an imaginative biography. Against the "grind" of finishing the Fry biography; Woolf wrote a verse play about the history of English literature. Her next novel, Pointz Hall (later retitled Between the Acts), would include the play as a pageant performed by villagers and would convey the gentry's varied reactions to it. As another holiday from Fry's biography, Woolf returned to her own childhood with "A Sketch of the Past," a memoir about her mixed feelings towards her parents and her past and about memoir writing itself. (Here surfaced for the first time in writing a memory of the teenage Gerald Duckworth, her other half brother, touching her inappropriately when she was a girl of perhaps four or five.) Through last-minute borrowing from the letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf finished her biography. Though convinced that Roger Fry (1940) was more granite than rainbow, Virginia congratulated herself on at least giving back to Vanessa "her Roger."
Woolf's chief anodyne against Adolf Hitler, World War II, and her own despair was writing. During the bombing of London in 1940 and 1941, she worked on her memoir and Between the Acts. In her novel, war threatens art and humanity itself, and, in the interplay between the pageant—performed on a June day in 1939—and the audience, Woolf raises questions about perception and response. Despite Between the Acts' affirmation of the value of art, Woolf worried that this novel was "too slight" and indeed that all writing was irrelevant when England seemed on the verge of invasion and civilization about to slide over a precipice. Facing such horrors, a depressed Woolf found herself unable to write. The demons of self-doubt that she had kept at bay for so long returned to haunt her. On March 28, 1941, fearing that she now lacked the resilience to battle them, she walked behind Monk's House and down to the River Ouse, put stones in her pockets, and drowned herself. Between the Acts was published posthumously later that year.
In addition to her novels, Virginia Woolf wrote a number of essays on cultural subjects, which appear in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924); The Common Reader (1925); A Room of One's Own (1929); The Second Common Reader (1932); Roger Fry (1940); The Death of the Moth (1942); and The Moment (1947). They reveal her as a critic of penetrating insight and superb stylistic gifts.
Characteristic and Features of Virginia Woolf Novel
(a) Her Themes: Although, as her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown makes clear, Virginia Woolf reacted against the novel of social manners as produced by writers like Arnold Bennett, she was none the less concerned with the realities of life. But for her, the realities were inward and spiritual rather than outward and material; of the life depicted by Bennett and Wells she knew nothing. The elusiveness of these inner realities is the recurrent theme of her novels. Her characters are seen in search of them, and the search is followed with profound insight, but it would seem that she never solved the problem of the ultimate meaning of life, for her novels, unlike those of Lawrence, give no solution.
(b) Her Technique: It is in this field that Virginia Woolf makes her most important contribution to the novel. Conventional conceptions of the novel she entirely rejected, replacing emphasis on incident, external description, and straightforward narrative by an overriding concern with character presentation by the 'stream of consciousness' method. This technique was not a new one. Dorothy Richardson had used it - Pointed Roofs (1915), Backwater (1916), Honeycomb (1917), etc. So had James Joyce, a greater exponent of this method than either. Its great advantages are that it offers previously undreamed - of possibilities for the analysis of mental states; its disadvantages, the great demands it makes on the reader, and the dangers of incoherence and mere virtuosity, which beset the author because of the lack of a logical time sequence and the temptation to go into the most minute detail. Virginia Woolf uses this technique with ever-growing sureness of purpose; her keen mind and magnificent artistic sense enable her to weld the parts a unified artistic whole of sensitive, subtle portraiture. Her studies of mood and impulse are handled with an almost scientific precision and detachment, and yet she has a great gift for lyrical exposition.
(c) Her Characters: "I believe that all novels deal with character, and that it is to express character - not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire - that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose and undramatic, so very elastic and alive, has been evolved." Thus did she express her concern with character, and of her method she wrote: " Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however, disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." For this probing of the inner workings of the mind, Virginia Woolf's penetrating insight equipped her admirably. Her range of characters is small: it has been said that she was unable to portray anyone who did not share her own unusual qualities, and it is certainly true that some of her figures, though studied with amazing subtlety, fail to come alive for the reader. "Even so, in the delicate analysis of motive, impulse, and reaction to situation, she sets a standard which very few have been able to attain, and of the three chief characters in Mrs. Dalloway, at least, we may claim that we know them from the inside as we know few other characters.
(d) Her Style: As might be expected of one of her background and artistic gifts, Virginia Woolf is a prose-writer of genius. It is in her prose style that her poetic qualities are most clearly seen. It has all the poise and charm of the cultured woman and conscious artist. She uses words with a keen sense of their rhythmic and musical potentialities; her style is richly figurative (The Waves is, the best example of this), and the precision of her images is in keeping with the accuracy and delicacy of her character analysis.