1. What kind of education Virginia Woolf receive?

Virginia Woolf was educated by her parents, Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen. She was raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society, she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere. Her education consisted of private Greek lessons and access to her father’s library.

2. What was the trauma of his life?

The death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was only 13, was the trauma of her life. This caused her first nervous breakdown.

3. What was the Bloomsbury Group?

The Bloomsbury Group was an influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, the best known members of which included V. Woolf, J.M. Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Their work near Bloomsbury in London.

4. In which novel did V. Woolf experiment with new narrative techniques?

In 1925, with the publication of the novel Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf experimented with new narrative technique.

5. What is the Common Reader?

The Common Reader is a volume of her literary essays published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932.

6. What makes Virginia Woolf a Modernist novelist?

Virginia Woolf was one of the most important modernist novelist, in fact she gave voice to the complex inner world of feelings and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. What mattered was the impression the events made on the characters who experienced them.

7. What kind of narrative technique/ s did she privileged and why?

In her novel the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’’ minds though flashback, association of idea s and momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux, the “stream of consciousness. Moreover, V. Woolf uses the free indirect discourse which employs the techniques of stream of consciousness narration, but outside the stricture of interior dialogue. In addition to stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse, Woolf employs silence to profound effect in her narratives. She creates the impression of silence through the introduction of peripheral, nearly mute characters and the use of parenthetical asides

8. What is the relationship between the inner and outer world in her fiction?

There is a relationship of simultaneous connection between the inner and outer world in her fiction because people try to react to a new situations, Sometimes the characters aren’t able to distinguish between their personal response and external reality. Sometimes that lead them to suicide

9. Why is plot reduced to the minimum in her fiction?

Plot in her fiction are reduced to the minimum because she wants to create a poetic and allusive images because the fluidity is the quality of the language of the intimate feelings.

1. What is the difference between J.Joyce’s and V.Woolf’s fiction?

Differently from Joyce’s characters, who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control, and she maintains logical and grammatical organization. Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought in the third person narrator. She gives the impression of simultaneous connection between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. While Joyce was more interested in language experimentation and worked though the accumulation of details, Woolf’s use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional. Fluidity is the quality of the language which flows following the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings

1. What is a moment of being?

Similar to Joyce’s “epiphanies” are Woolf’s “moment of being”, rare moment of insight during the characters’ daily life when they can see reality behind appearances

2. Discuss the mort relevant narrative features in the extract Clarissa and Septimus

Virginia Woolf's Clarissa and Septimus has a unique narrative style, salient for its shifts in the streams of consciousness, from one character to another. She conveys, with realism, multiple subjective perspectives on grand themes including oppression and death. The reader is slow to form a judgment on any character because what they are told about them is not the objective truth but rather the subjective impression told by a fellow character. The narrator reports the speech or thought of a character ‘while moving inside the character’s consciousness to take on the style and tone of their own immediate speaking voice. The free indirect style refuses to dominate or contain voices, blurring authorial hierarchy and emphasizing multiplicity and unification. The multiple voices of the novel come together through connecting devices.