A Mrs. Dalloway essay would focus on the classical fictional novel from 1925 written by Virginia Woolf. The novel describes a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a woman belonging to the high society of the post First World War England, hence, the novel is also a valuable account of those times. The Time magazine included Mrs. Dalloway in its list of 100 best English language novels since 1923. The novel can be also considered a reflection on the choices that everyone makes in life. In this context, it is worth mentioning the character of Sally Seton to whom Mrs. Dalloway was romantically attracted but who was not an option considering the times. Explore the essays in this category for more topics.
It is neither unique nor uncommon for great authors to weave themselves into the fabric of their own works; it is a technique that adds realism and believability to otherwise complex fictional characters. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and James Joyce’s Portrait of the...
Alexandra Harris claims in Romantic Moderns that to plant flowers in the middle of a war was to assert one’s firm belief in the future. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the first world war, and her final novel Between the...
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed significant strides in the upheaval of gender bias and patriarchal standards. Women gained many more liberties, such as with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the first wave of feminism was at its golden age. However, gender...
Eric Auerbach writes in Mimesis that one of the characteristics of the realistic novel of the era between the two world wars is the multi-personal representations of consciousness. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, the novel delves into the consciousness of many...
Virginia Woolf in “Mrs. Dalloway” mocks the superficiality of social conventions in society, keeping its individual members in constant effort to pretend, mask their individuality and abandon their individual needs. The text raises questions of how individuals are shaped by their social environments, how historical...
‘Clarissa could not be wider of the mark when she “thank(s) heaven” that “the war was over”. Virtually every character we encounter is to some degree a living casualty of the class-based superficiality that led to the conflict and continues to dominate society.’ Explore and...
Mrs.Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was set in London in 1923, five years after the end of the First World War. World War I, which took place between 1914 and 1918, had devastating effects on the lives of soldiers and civilians, to a degree never experienced...
Virginia Woolf grants us an access to a new concept of time in “Mrs. Dalloway”, through which temporality-moment is investigated in two contradictory ways: one is continuous, deadly, dissolving while the other is placid, immortal, infinite; hence the combination of them has created a new...
Sally Seton “But this question of love, this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?” -Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is perhaps one...
Each individual has an outward part of her personality that is revealed to others and an inward part which is kept solely to herself. Consequently, there is a contrast between the appearance of a person and the reality of whom that person really is. In...
Virginia Woolf, 20th century English novelist, successfully wrote and developed her stories with some of the most unique writing styles of the time. Through one of her most famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf takes the use of symbolism beyond the usual. Frequently, symbolism is used...
Throughout the stories of Mrs. Dalloway and The Artificial Silk Girl, both female characters, Clarissa and Doris carry different goals and ambitions regarding the life that they wish to live. Each of their life journeys further defines their character and gives special meaning to the...
A slim volume seldom exceeding two-hundred pages, a cursory survey of Mrs. Dalloway hardly suggests the astronomical weight of literary and social significance critics have harvested from Woolf’s prose since it’s publication in 1925. At once revered as Britain’s archetypal post-war elegy, a twentieth-century feminist...
In “The Book of the Grosteques,” the first story of his novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson introduces the concept of the “grotesque.” This concept sets up the following stories in the novel, and can also be seen in other modernist texts following the publication of...
Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway uses themes that scrutinize the environment of interwar England, which inhibited the ability to effectively communicate one’s thoughts and feelings, because the cultural norm dismissed them in favor of keeping a “stiff upper lip”. In order to survive in this...
Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches… they had to be together, share...
The ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres are often held as two separate entities, both representing opposing positions of social freedom or restraint. Whereas the public realm is the more conformed-to and socially hegemonic of the two, the private is associated with an unseen process of identification,...
“There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue, he thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little diversion)…He pursued; she changed....
Critic Bradbury states that “With light taxation, no inflation, cheap food, cheap labour, a plentiful supply of domestic servants, many ordinary middle class families with modest incomes lived full and comfortable lives. No wonder that so many who came from such families and survived the...