1. What kind of education did Virginia Woolf receive?
Virginia Woolf was homeschooled: she received private lessons and learnt Greek. Since her father owned a large library, Woolf had access to a great number of literary works: she read whatever she liked.
2. What was the trauma of her life?
The death of her mother was the first trauma of Virginia Woolf's life and it caused her a nervous breakdown.
3. What was the Bloomsbury Group?
The Bloomsbury Group was a literary association that reunited English intellectuals (writers, poets, ...) during the first decades of the XX century. It was the first group joined by Woolf.
4. In which novel did Virginia Woolf experiment with new narrative techniques?
Virginia Woolf began to write in 1905, after her father's death. In her first works, the writer followed tradition. It was only in 1925 that she experimented new literary techniques with her new novel: "Mrs. Dalloway".
5. What is the Common Reader?
"The Common Reader" is a collection of essays written by Virginia Woolf. The title of the collection refers to the audience addressed by the writer: Woolf writes for a large audience and not for an elité.
6. What makes Virginia Woolf a Modernist Novelist?
Virginia Woolf is a Modernist novelist for different reasons: first of all, her works are meant to investigate the inner reality of man and to register reality through impressions and not the way it is. Moreover, she is one of the many intellectuals that look for an order by means of literature, which happens during the first decades of the century.
7. What kind of narrative techniques did she privilege and why?
Woolf's technique consists of the use of the "stream of consciousness" and of the so-called "moments of being": both of them are means to convey a characters' thoughts, which is the purpose of her fiction.
8. What is the relationship between the inner and outer world in her fiction?
Inner and outer world happen to be fused in a character's thoughts: reality (the outer world) is conveyed through a character's impressions and reactions rather than through descriptions provided by the narrator himself.
9. Why is the plot reduced to the minimum in her fiction?
Virginia Woolf focuses her attention on the thoughts, impressions and reactions of one characters to the events of reality. Thus, most of the novel is occupied by introspective scenes and there is little room left for the plot and the action: the events of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway", for example, last only one day.
10. What is the difference between Joyce's and Woolf's fiction?
Both writers use the technique known as "stream of consciousness", though there are a few differences: Joyce experimented with language and removed logical connections, leaving them free, without control. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf paid attention to the presence of logical connections between thoughts and didn't let them free.
11. What is a moment of being?
A "moment of being" happens when one is living a moment of life very intensely (it does not matter whether it is important or just a piece of ordinary life). Being the mind extremely focused, the mind itself is able to register that moment, which will be remembered vividly. A "moment of being" also allows one to see one's life.
12. Discuss the most relevant narrative features in the extract "Clarissa and Septimus".
The most relevant narrative feature in the extract is the way Virginia Woolf arranges the characters' thoughts. A third person omniscient narrator follows the thoughts of different characters: first Clarissa's, then Mrs. Pym's, later Septimus' and Lucretia (Septimus' wife). The line that divides the character's minds isn't quite clear - one could say that there isn't any line at all: the reader is somehow thrown from one mind to another, while he/she has just read a few sentences. Indeed, thoughts seem to flow like a stream (of consciousness).