Virginia Woolf

 

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is many things: definitely more than a day in the life of a wealthy British wife who has stepped out into the London streets to buy some flowers. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative alights on various interconnected characters, inhabiting each for a time. Soundwaves echo and invisible threads waft through the city. Past is conflated with present, city with nature, life with death. Ultimately, the novel is an examination of the nature of existence, with the human subject creating meaning as s/he encounters phenomena in the world.

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Three Guineas

How to prevent war? This question guides the premise of Woolf’s book-length essay, Three Guineas, in which she muses on how to contribute to a peaceful future while living within the constraints of patriarchal society. Three Guineas was written during the lead-up to World War II. In the face of rising fascism and current conflicts world-over, it remains tragically relevant.

 

The Waves

The Waves is almost more a novel-length poem, or a prose poem as some call it, than a novel. It has a plot insofar as it follows the life trajectories of six childhood boarding-school friends. But rather than structuring the novel along a series of narrative events, Woolf uses the perspectives of her characters to orchestrate a dreamy, free-floating,  stream-of-consciousness meditation on the nature of existence.