It is difficult to imagine a more favourable background for a future writer than that of Virginia Woolf. She was born in London, the second daughter (by his second marriage) of Leslie Stephen, the eminent critic, biographer, philosopher and scholar. Her father took charge of her education himself, and from an early age she was allowed access to his magnificent library. During her childhood, which was divided between Hyde Park Gate and St. Ives, Cornwall, she displayed those characteristics which were to develop and intensify themselves in later life: a brilliant creative intelligence, allied to a delicate nervous constitution.

After her father's death in 1904, she moved, with her sister Vanessa and her brother Adrian, to Bloomsbury, where her first serious writing began. Her earliest work consisted of literary criticism: she contributed articles to various journals and remained a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement until her death.

The house in Bloomsbury became a regular meeting place for a group of brilliant young men whom Virginia's elder brother had known at Cambridge. They included Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. To those outside its circle, the goup became known as the 'Bloomsbury group'.

In 1912, Virginia married a member of the group - Leonard Woolf, a journalist, publicist and writer on political topics. In October 1914, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved to Richmond, where they occupied rooms in a house on the east side of the Green, Number 17. Leonard Woolf describes some amusing incidents which he experienced here in the volume of his autobiography called Beginning Again

Early in March 1915, the couple moved to Hogarth House in Paradise Road, at that time divided into two separate residences. The move came at an unhappy and unsettled period in their life, for Virginia was suffering from a severe attack of the mental illness which was to recur at various times during her life. In 1913 she completed her first novel The Voyage Out (published 1915). As was the case with each book she wrote, the work left her in a state of extreme physical, mental and nervous exhaustion, and in September 1913 she had attempted to take her own life. In February 1915, however, there was another, more serious recurrence of the illness which this time lasted until about 1917.

Leonard Woolf was anxious to find some hobby or occupation in which he and his wife could engage and which would serve as a relief from her writing with all its attendant mental stress. They were both interested, as amateurs, in the art of printing and in march 1917 they purchased a small handpress, some old face type and the necessary accompanying implements and materials. The first book was issued from this modest equipment in July 1917. It was a 32 page pamphlet entitled Two Stories containing Virginia Woolf's story The Mark on the Wall and one by her husband called Three Jews. The title page bore the imprint "Hogarth Press, Richmond 1917". Thus began the life of a publishing house which was to become world famous.

In the years immediately following, the business of the press expanded rapidly, additional equipment was installed at Hogarth House and some of the work of printing was handled by outside firms. However, sixteen of the thirty-two books which were published during the years that the press was in Richmond (1917 - 1924) were printed by the Woolf's own hands. These sixteen included two works of Virginia Woolf: the story mentioned above and Kew Gardens published in 1919. In the latter, the author conveys not only the visual impression of the gardens themselves but also the mood of the typical and symbolic characters who haunt them.

In her diary on July 20th, she describes, with typically acute observation, her impressions of the "peace" celebrations held in Richmond that year:

"...After sitting through the procession and the peace bells unmoved, I began, after dinner, to feel that if something was going on, perhaps one had better be in it... The doors of the public house at the corner were open and the room crowded; couples waltzing; songs being shouted, waveringly, as if one must be drunk to sing. A troop of little boys with lanterns were parading the green, beating sticks. Not many shops went to the expense of electric light. A woman of the upper classes was supported, dead drunk, between two men partially drunk. We followed a moderate stream flowing up the Hill. Illuminations were almost extinct half way up, but we kept on till we reached the terrace. And then we did see something - not much indeed, for the damp had deadened the chemicals. Red and green and yellow and blue balls rose slowly in the air, burst, flowered into an oval of light, which dropped into minuter grains and expired. There were hazes of light at different points. Rising over the Thames, among trees, these rockets were beautiful; the lights on the faces of the crowd was strange; yet of course there was a grey mist muffling everything and taking the blaze off the fire...."
Besides The Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens two other works by Virginia Woolf were first published under the Richmond imprint of the Hogarth Press; the collection of short sketches called Monday or Tuesday (1921) and the novel Jacob's Room (1922). The appearance of the former marked the real turning point of Virginia Woolf's career, for in these sketches she was experimenting with a new technique of writing which enabled her, in the words of David Daiches, "to embody in fiction her conception of the flux of experience a style that was flexible, impressionistic, meditative." This technique was to be further developed in Jacob's Room and the novels which followed.
The Woolfs moved from Hogarth House to 52, Tavistock Square, London, in March 1924.

Her last novel, published in the year of her death was Between the Acts. Early in 1941 the symptoms of mental illness re-asserted themselves and in April of that year she drowned herself in hte river near the house which she and her husband owned in Rodmell, Surrey.

From the Richmond Upon Thames Local Studies Collection
 
 

As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.

As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.

Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland

The New York Times Book Review, John W. Crawford
Virginia Woolf, is almost alone ... in the intricate yet clear art of her composition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. read more

From AudioFile
Published in 1925 and showing the influence of Freud and Joyce, this perceptive, richly textured novel follows the title's society matron through one seemingly insignificant June day. In the hands of a mediocre interpreter, the whole exercise would sound tediously empty. Fortunately, Eileen Atkins, whose one-woman show on Woolf, A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, captivated The West End and Broadway, displays a thorough intimacy with both style and subtext. She vigorously shares her insight, along with her... read more

Synopsis
Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. read more
 

This book is fabulous. The way it portrays time passing is incredible, you feel as if you are experiencing a day in London after the first World War. The way Woolf shifts the narrative from one person to the next is done very well. The book is very short in length, and is easier to read than Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and is much shorter than Remembrances of Things Past, so thus would be a nice introduction to stream of consciousness writing.
 
 

This book was published 74 years ago and was, in its day, somewhat experimental. It is not so dense and difficult as "Ulysses" (I believe Mrs. Woolf was reading Joyce and Proust at the time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway) and is much more accessible, not to mention shorter.
I personally loved this book and found it liberating as a writer, to read the flowing, discursive narrative. The language is worked by a master craftsman and a pleasure to read. Without books like this, newer books like "Angela's Ashes" would not exist. Writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Dylan Thomas paved the way for prose such as Frank McCourt uses in his book on his Irish childhood.

The book takes a little patience, I admit. It's not a book that "gets on with it. It's a book for reading, sometimes as little as a page or two a day, and for savoring. I don't agree with some reviewers thinking it's a "woman's" book as opposed to a "man's" book. I don't agree with some of the didactic comments here, either... complaints about the use of parataxsis, for instance. People think paratactically, why not write that way? It requires that the reader shift gears somewhat, that's all.

I found the book engaging all the way through. I think the great triumph of this book is that, given the distance - from the majority of present day readers - in time, culture, and class of the main character one can nonetheless find common ground internally with this attenuated woman and her worries and concerns. Yes, she is worried about the flowers for her party, but she is also worried about her daughter's apparent affection for another character.
 
 

How come everyone around us has these fixed ideas about what we are? Is constant shifts in emotions and thoughts sufficient to categorize us as separate and whole human beings? Maybe we can be just as influenced by somebody we have never even met as our very closest relations. "What a plunge!" -into the very center of our selves. Dearing as always, Mrs Virginia Woolf reveals her characters and herself in this confusing and intricate novel.
 

This is an incredible, but difficult book. You'll be disappointed if you expect a leisurely, summer read. I read it for a class and ended up reading it several more times. It beautifully captures some of the most poignant feelings in life. Things to look for: the repetition of the number "three", references to Milton and birds of paradise, waves & undulation....There's so much more. This book is absolutely amazing.
 
 

A definition of the feminism can be a movement which original finality is the iguality of women and men in the individual rights and to avoid the differences in the legislations that reduce the capacity of the woman in respect to the man.

Making reference to Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf tells us the history of a woman, Clarissa Dalloway mixing the real present with regards of the past t
A definitihrough the story of a day of her life in London, plenty of impressions, feelings and regards of the characters.
In conclusion, is a female soul that evoke, from the fullness of a filled existence, the illusions and wishes of a lost youth.

This book is dedicated to a woman, the principal character is a woman, a female, therefore we can see as the writer wants focus her history in a woman. In this case the importance of the female has been found in this book.

I think, as a general conclusion I have tried to analize the feminism, the writer Virginia Woolf and her book Mrs. Dalloway therefore my work has finished.
 
 

SOME BIBLIOGRAPHY

A:/Amazon_com buying info Mrs Dalloway.htm
Richmond Upon Thames Local Studies Collections
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Compiled by Cristina Cerdà Puig
Academic year 1999/2000
21 Enero 2000
©a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés Lòpez
©Cristina Cerdà Puig
Universitat de València Press