Virginia Woolf

1. Woolf received a home-made education, rather than attending Cambridge university like her brothers did. She was given private lessons in her family’s intellectual atmosphere.
2. During her youth she attends her parents’ death: her mother left died  in 1895, while her father followed her in 1904, causing a deep nervous breakdown.
3. The Bloomsbury Group was an association of intellectuals who developed during the first decade of the XX century. Their aim was to primarily challenge Victorian values founded on morality and responsibility.
4. Woolf experimented new narrative techniques in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925): she introduced an unconventional idea of time thanks to the stream of consciousness.
5. The Common Reader is the most important essay by V.Woolf, the evidence that the British writer was not only a novelist, but a very talented literary critic too.
6. Woolf is a modernist novelist because she adopted a revolutionary narrative technique, according to which the omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shifts inside the characters’ mind.
7. Woolf privileged the stream of consciousness, because it better expressed one’s psychological activity, presenting one’s mind as a continuous flux.
8. In her fiction the inner and outer world are linked by tenuous connections and disjunctions.
9. The plot is reduced to the minimum because it better gave voice to the complex inner world. Feelings, memories and impression are condensed in short statements without chronological traditional organization.
10. While in Joyce’s stream of consciousness  syntactical order is demolished, in Woolf’s one logical and grammatical order is maintained. Moreover they both experimented free dialogues: Joyce prefers free direct speech, while Woolf privileged free reported speech.
11. A moment of being is an powerful and memorable instant, when one becomes fully conscious catching a revelation from a trivial ordinary experience.
12. In the extract Clarissa and Septimus the reader attends Woolf’s adoption of the stream of consciousness: there is no chronological sequence of events. The narration follows a subjective order given by mental associations of ideas, where flashbacks and flashforwards often interrupt the linear proceeding of the story. One’s psychological activity is expressed by means of a mental flux of memories and reality, which gives space to the protagonist’s thoughts and emotions.