Reading Mrs Dalloway

This week we are going to move from Joseph Conrad to Virginia Woolf and we are going to look for similarities and differences in these two novels.

There are a some very obvious differences between the novels, in fact they are so very different in so many ways that you may find it difficult to see past them and find any similarities at all. Nevertheless there are some.

Don't forget also to look for the theme of empire. How does it present itself in Mrs Dalloway? What is the context in which this novel was written? What events in history have passed between the writing of this novel in the 1920s and the writing of Conrad's in the 1890s? How might these events have altered the general view of the world?

Read a Dalloway enthusiast

Read a Dalloway hater

Virginia Woolf and the Modern novel

We are studying Joseph Conrad this week and will be going on to read Virginia Woolf's  Mrs Dalloway in the following two weeks.

You may find Mrs Dalloway tough going at first, but please persist. Do use Spark notes or any of the other guides to help you. Remember, the modernists, as we discussed last week, were interested in rendering not a representation of reality onto the page but rather a sense of the feeling of the experience of life.

If Mrs Dalloway seems disjointed and confusing it is because we are being invited into the consciousness of the characters. We are being given a rendition of their thought processes rather than any rational description or explanation of their actions.

To get an idea of what Virginia Woolf was trying to do. Read her essay MODERN FICTION to be found here:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html#C12

And you might like this lecture on Virginia Woolf: