In the extracts from “Mrs Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse”, the reader can find examples of the features of Modernist fiction.

Both novels are organised into scenes, which are apparently non connected, the plot is reduced to the minimum (“Mrs Dalloway” tells the story of one day); subjectivity is more relevant and there is no more the linearity of time of traditional fiction, but the simultaneity of the time covers present, past and future. The narrator is a third person omniscient narrator, who adopts the narrative technique of the interior monologue that is the narration develops moving inside characters' mind. The interior monologue is rendered by free direct or indirect style and by the shift of the point of view.

In the extract from “To the Lighthouse” Virgina Woolf provides occasions to reflect on the relationship man-woman: she tells about Mr and Mrs Ramsay and explains how Mrs Ramsay is a reference point in the house. In the extract that I have analyzed, the reader comes to know the figure of Mrs Ramsay who is described as a column, a fertile and mature woman. In addition the figure of Mr Ramsay is described as a sterile and immature man. Mr Ramsay needs his wife's support and he depends totally on her. Mrs Ramsay demonstrates her strengh with her behaviour: she can do more things at the same time. From this extract the reader can notice how the woman is stronger than man, but from Mr Ramsay's and Mrs Ramsay's point of view the reader can notice how they consider their relationship as an harmonic union.

In D. H. Lawrence's The Fox there are occasions to reflect on the relationship man-woman too, but it is different from Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship. Henry wants March's independece to broke and he wants to marry her. He doesn't want her a man's job to do, but he wants her to stay at home and to do woman's job. March is passive and she does what before Banford and Henry say.

So while in “To the Lighthouse” Mrs Ramsay is stronger than her husband, even if she doesn't wanto to say it, in “The Fox” at the beginning March is described as a stong woman, but finally she is passive and she can't react to Henry and she loses her independence.