Woolf's education consisted in Greek lessons. She had access to her father's library where she could read whatever she liked.

The main trauma of his life was the loss of her mother. Virginia was thirtheen when her mother died: as a consequence she developed a deep depression that lead to a mental breakdown.

The Bloomsbury group was an informal association of intellectuals and artists who lived in London. The group had no specific mission but questioning the main topics of traditional/Victorian literature such as morality, respectability and sexual relations.

Virginia experimented her new technique in her novel Mrs Dalloway, in 1925.

The Common Reader is a volume of literary essays that proves Woolf's ability as a critic.

Her interest in giving voice to the inner world of feeling, emotions and memory that builds up human personality. Plot is no longer important and the omniscient narrator is neglected. The novel is the transcription of the continuous flux of consciousnesses that characterizes human mind.

Woolf privileges the fusion of streams of thought into a third person, past tense narrator. However she never leaves characters' thoughts out of control, maintaining a logical and grammatical organization.

Woolf novels are based on feelings and not on conventions: “life is a luminous halo” and not a comedy, or tragedy. There is no interest in plot. She does not focuses on the events that made up a story but on the effect such events made on the characters.

Joyce is more interested in language experimentation and uses the accumulation as a means to convey message. Woolf's use of language, on the other hand, is poetic and allusive, emotional. Her language is fluid and makes naturally flow even intricate thoughts and feelings.

Moments of being are acts of intense and conscious experience of reality: it is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience as a human being, catching a glimpse of the large connections of the world around him.

The most relevant narrative technique is the alternation of thoughts and action. Clarissa shows a obsessive attention on the detail distinguishing between the variety of colorus, scents and shapes of the flowers. Plot is reduced to minimum and is fragmented. Woolf adopts a plurality of points of view.