ENGLISH WRITTEN TEST

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. Her father was an eminent Victorian man of letters and he imposed her a rigid education that oppresed her desires and ideas. Indeed she partecipated to private Greek lessons and accessed to the library of the father. He had a conflictual relationship with her father. After her father's death Virginia can began her literary life. She became a memeber of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant.garde of early 20^th century London.

She experienced her new narrative techiniques in the novel Mrs Dolloway and then she demonstrated her talent in the literary essay, The Common Reader (1927).

Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feelings and coinceived the human personality as a continuos shift of impressions and emotions. What mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. Moreover the point of view shifted inside the characters' minds through flashbacks and associations of ideas presented as a continuos flux.

Both Joyc and Woolf used the technique of stream of consciousness: Joyce showed characters' thought directly through interior monologue and sometimes in a incoherent way; Woolf, instead, never lets her characters' thoughts flow without control. Similar to Joyce's “epiphanies” are Woolf's “moment of being” that is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience. While Joyce was more interested in language experimentation and worked through tha accumulation of details, Woolf's use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional.

Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day. Clarissa Dalloway's party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative gathering all the people Clarissa thinks about during th day. The novel reflects also on the reaction of people to new situations and provide insight into some of the most significant changes in the social life of time. Clarissa has extreamly conventional views on politics and women's rights. Moreover she is characterized by opposing feeling. Indeed is important the theory that Septimus is Clarissa's double. Septimus is an extremaly sensitive man who suffer from the death of his best friend.