Eng426 20th century english literature

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf was one of the most revolutionary and controversial English writers of the 20^th century as her writings whether creative or critical (essays) demonstrate. She was concerned about liberty and freedom for writers and their art as well as for women, their lives and their writings. In her book, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf is optimistic that in years to come, women’s writing would be better than what it was in her own time. She was very passionate about the changes that came or started in her time and she wrote about this in her essays like “Three Guineas”, “A Room of One’s Own”, “Women and Writing”, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, “Modern Fiction” and her novels.

0. OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit you should be able to:

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  discuss the life and modernist inclination of Virginia Woolf;
  
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  analyse Mrs. Dalloway by highlighting modernist features in the novel.
  

0. MAIN CONTENT

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   Virginia Woolf
   

Virginia Woolf was born to Sir Leslie Stephen a literary critic of renown. She inherited her father’s passion for books. She was a complicated woman whose mental instability perhaps led her to attempt suicide twice before she eventually succeeded in taking her own life in 1941. Her creative works include Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts, Woolf’s last novel which was published posthumously. As a writer, Woolf snatched the novel from the governing traditional rules and conventions. Her position is argued in different essays and reviews where she looks at authors and their approaches to character creation, plot, and perspective. In her essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf posits that a writer should be in a continuous quest for new ways with which to shape his/her imagination and thereby discover new possibilities. She posits further that the novel or fiction should be a record, an account for the reality within and not only outside. In “Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” through the imaginary Mrs. Brown, Woolf states that the foundation of any good fiction is the character. Character-creation, which should explore the tensions and influences of the mind, is the soul of fiction. These views are echoed and pronounced through her novels, particularly Mrs. Dalloway.

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