Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway

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Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
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World War I -- War in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction

• 1914-1918
• 10 million soldiers died
• Dead 2 x (number killed in all major wars from
  1790-1913)

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World War I

• It was in 1915 the old world ended.
• D. H. Lawrence
• The lamps are going out all over Europe. We
  shall not see them lit again in our time.
• Sir Edward Grey
• It was while invalided in hospital during the
  Great War that I began to record notes and
  souvenirs of the times and institutions under
  which I had lived, realizing that I had witnessed
  the suicide of the civilization called Christian
  and the travail of a new era to which no gods
  have been as yet rash enough to give their name,
  and remembering that, with my friends and
  contemporaries, I shared the fortunes and
  misfortunes of being born at the end of a chapter
  in history.
• Shane Leslie

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Virginia Woolf1882-1941

• - On or about December 1910 human nature changed.
• ("Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924)
• - Look within and life, it seems, is very far
  from being 'like this.' Examine for a moment an
  ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
  receives a myriad of impressions--trivial,
  fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the
  sharpness of steel. From all sides the come, an
  incessant shower of innumerable atoms and as
  they fall, as they shape themselves into the life
  of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
  differently from of old the moment of importance
  came not here but there so that if a writer were
  a free man and not a slave, if he could write
  what he chose, not what he must, if he could base
  his work upon his own feeling and not upon
  convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no
  tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
  accepted style, and perhaps not a single button
  sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
  Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
  arranged but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
  envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
  consciousness to the end.
• ("Modern Fiction," 1919)
• - I have an idea that I will invent a new name
  for my books to supplant 'novel.' A new ------ by
  Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?
• (Diary, June 27, 1925)

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Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway
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• - Austen stimulates us to supply what is not
  there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle,
  yet it is composed of something that expands in
  the reader's mind and endows with the most
  enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly
  trivial.
• (The Common Reader, 1932)
• - For we are apt to forget, reading as we do,
  only masterpieces of a bygone age how great a
  power the body of literature possesses to impose
  itself how it will not suffer itself to be read
  passively, but takes and reads us flouts our
  preconceptions questions principles which we had
  got in the habit of taking for granted, and, in
  fact, splits us into two parts as we read, making
  us, even as we enjoy, yield our ground or stick
  to our guns.
• (The Common Reader, 1932)
• -But the great writer--the Hardy or the
  Proust--goes on his way regardless of the rights
  of private property. . . . he inflicts his own
  perspective upon us so severely that often as not
  we suffer agonies--our vanity is injured because
  our own order is upset we are afraid because the
  old supports are being wrenched fro us and we
  are bored. . . . Yet from anger, fear and
  boredom a rare and lasting delight is sometimes
  born. . . . Finally, that is to say, we are
  forced to drop our own preconceptions and to
  accept what the writer wishes to give us.
• (The Common Reader, 1932)