1)      Virginia Woolf’s father was an eminent Victorian man of letters, and so she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere, receiving also private Greek lessons and having access to her father’s library.

2)      Her mother’s death in 1895, when she was only thirteen, represented a trauma for Virginia because it affected her deeply and brought her first nervous breakdown.

3)      The Bloomsbury Group was group of English  intellectuals. Its the best known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. They  lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.

4)      Virginia Woolf experimented new narrative techniques in the novel called “Mrs. Dalloway”, in which she introduced the stream of consciousness.

5)      The Common Reader is one of Woolf’s most important essays, because it highlights that the British writer was also a literary critic, and not only a novelist.

6)      Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovators of modern fiction, because she was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.

7)      In her novels, the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’ mind through flashbacks, association of ideas and momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.

8)      The relationship between inner and outer world in her fiction is conveyed by tenuous connection and disjunctions.

9)      In Woolf’s fiction, the plot is reduced to the minimum because the events that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her; what mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them.

10)   Both Joyce and V. Woolf were famous for the way that they use stream of consciousness in their works to record the ongoing thoughts and feelings of their characters as they develop at the moment of experiencing them. By analysing their work,  you can see that there are significant differences. The biggest difference is represented by Joyce's use of epiphanies, and Woolf use of "moment of being”.  For Joyce, his fiction is marked by moments of intense realization, when his characters suddenly discover truths about themselves and are given moments of intense insight. For Woolf, on the other hand, her fiction features "moments of being", moments when an individual is fully conscious of his experience.

11)   So, a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life.

12)   The most relevant narrative feature in the extract Clarissa and Septimus consists of the use of the stream of consciousness. The narration follows the order given by mental associations of ideas, and is often interrupted by flashbacks.