Essays on Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, is regarded as one of the first and most important modern feminist writers. In Orlando: A Biography, she tackles and bends the concepts of gender roles and gender identity and, on the other hand, deals with the subject of biography...

Virginia Woolf, one of the most innovative and important writers of her time, emphasizes modernist ideals and the importance of the individual in her work. In Virginia Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Woolf argues the idea that gender roles can be oppressive,...

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...

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway criticizes societal conventions as it portrays the internal thoughts of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and the various characters that surround her in post-World War I London. Woolf illustrates the mental repercussions of the war and the past in general through the...

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about time: its quality, its depth, and its composition. Woolf conveys the complexity of time by drawing attention to her characters’ unique struggles to create meaning for themselves within the confines of passing time. The entire novel takes...

In the early twentieth century, many writers began to give a more complex, nuanced, and realistic portrayal of the issues that surround gender. Virginia Woolf, often heralded as one of the most important voices in feminist literature, wrote about this concept in a way that,...

In Virginia Woolf’s book Mrs. Dalloway, a variety of characters with complex, unique personalities are brought to life. Woolf uses vivid imagery and poignant monologues in order to highlight and simultaneously criticize the social structure, political affairs, and economic state of post-World War I England....

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is an experimental novel, in which Woolf uses stream of consciousness to portray family dynamics, gender relations, and attitudes toward the ontology of art and the artistic subject. The lighthouse itself is an important symbol in the novel in that it brings...

Compared with other literature of the Heian Period, the Torikaebaya Monogatari stands out as an unusual story. The reversal of gender roles that is central to the plot is a narrative device not found among the other surviving monogatari from this era. Although viewed as...

In the works of Virginia Woolf freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf discusses freedom at great length in her texts, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as they please in her fiction to the creative freedom of the artist in...

In the essay “Shakespeare’s Sister,” Virginia Woolf creates the fictional character of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, to symbolize oppression and proto-feminism in the early 17th century. Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister” essay depicts a life before feminism, where a woman in the Elizabethan era would never be able...

In her novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf lavishly constructs the individual “realities” of multiple characters though a narration of their thoughts, impressions, perceptions, doubts, and the silent, self-questioning processes underlying the surface of human behavior. As a result, reality in the book exists only...

‘Modernism was a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations’. It was a predominantly English genre of fiction writing, popular from roughly the 1910s into the 1960s. Modernist literature was born due to increasing industrialization and globalization....

Abstract In this essay the feminist theories of Virginia Woolf are examined and analysed, as well as connected to the famous novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Woolf introduces the theories of women’s economic and social freedom being crucial for women’s progression in society...

“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 of the...

In Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, flowers tell the reader many things about Clarissa. She uses flowers as pawns in her artificial game of life. Clarissa gives flowers human features and develops human attachments to them because she has difficulty understanding people. In other...

Chapter 17 sees all members of the Ramsay family and their guests at dinner. The interaction of these characters in this chapter allows for themes such as challenging expectations and, more importantly, the theme of communication to be explored. These themes in particular are concerns...

From the invisible to the visible is but a step, and a very quick step at that. The task of the metaphor is to render concrete and palpable, through analogy, the abstract and unseen, and Virginia Woolf peppers To the Lighthouse, especially the largely interior...

Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary novel To the Lighthouse provides an incredibly in-depth psychological study of its many characters. Family and friends pass through the Ramsay’s summer home in the Hebrides, all of whom carry characteristics, tendencies, and beliefs worthy of analysis on any number of levels....