In every cultured person’s life, the moments devoted to reading are always important ones. When you read, it is a completely new world which comes to life, surrounding and separating you from the rest of the “real” world, giving you a special closeness to the events and the characters, which seem to be there just for you. J. Winterson in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal said “Books are a home. […] There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm”.

The magic of a book certainly derives from its unique possibility of being at once personal and public: indeed, everyone knows a book is printed out in thousands of identical copies, thus allowing thousands of readers to read the same story; however, when you pick up your own copy and you sit on the sofa with it, you feel as if you were a privileged man (or woman) since you are in direct touch with the characters; you rejoice with the hero for his achievements, you feel pitiful for him when he fails or he enters a crisis, and you finally feel relieved when the anti-hero is defeated. The intimacy you experience with a character has hardly any comparison with what happens in real life, where we are often suffocated by the rush and, sadly, also by hypocrite people. A book follows your own pace, no matter if you are a fast person or a slow one, and there is always a bond of trust and agreement between reader and narrator.

However, sometimes it may happen that books become a place to escape from a reality we feel too inadequate, and we may get so involved with a character that we even start loving him/her. You fall into the story, and you see yourself in the events of the novel, standing near your character, supporting him/her or what he/she fights for; and you believe his/her message is worth to be spread in the real world. In other words, people who are in love with a fictional character try to “contaminate” the world around them with the world of the novel, starting to act and think in order to bring into the world the good they found in the world of the novel. Many people would believe this is just paranoia or, worse, some kind of schizoid behaviour, but even the famous Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, in the preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author, wrote that characters, once the writer has given them life, become autonomous entities, and they behave according to their temperament and their personality, and thus every person can imagine how they may behave in a situation which is totally different from the one narrated in the novel or in the play. Hence, a character, when he is brought outside the novel, sublimates into his believes, into the message he brings with him, and he becomes an archetype, an example of a way to look at the real world. Therefore, the novel stops being something unrelated to the external world, and becomes a basis from which we construct our key to analyse the reality around us.

Mrs Dalloway is surely an example of how this “contamination” of worlds (literary one and material one) can become true. The novel brings to life all the weaknesses and the strengths of the main character, Mrs Dalloway, who is, not for chance, a woman. V. Woolf was always very concerned with the condition of women in 20^th century Britain, where very few of them could have “a room of one’s own” (which is also the title of one of her most famous essays) and a sufficiently good income. Women were starting to fight for the reconnaissance of their rights, and Mrs Dalloway thus became the effective example of the world seen from the eyes of a woman. Thus, Mrs Dalloway embodied the claim of women’s importance in society, a vindication of their role, and an open critique towards the ones who believed women write about people, men write about the world.

Nevertheless, Mrs Dalloway’s importance is much greater since she is not an idealized character, distant from everyday life; on the contrary, she is constructed in order to appear the most realistic to our eyes, a woman with both good and bad sides, with both merits and flaws. So the closeness someone may feel towards Mrs Dalloway is different from the one usually felt towards other characters; we do not see her as a “maximum” we try to reach, but rather one of us, a heroine of everyday life, as women (we men must admit that) really are.

Concluding, books must be an important part of our life not just because they give us a culture, but because they speak of us, of what we are or what we want to become, and it may be a good idea to listen to what they have to tell us.