Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf (For M.A II Sem

Transcript:Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf (For M.A II Sem:
Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf (For M.A II Sem English Paper IV) Prof. Sunita Murmu Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941): Life Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the daughter of the literary critic and biographer, Leslie Stephen, and his wife Julia Duckworth. She was married to Leonard Woolf, the founder of the Hogarth Press. She along with her husband was a member of the Bloomsbury’s Group, an informal group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century in Bloomsbury, London. To this group belonged Vanessa Bell (her sister) and her husband Clive Bell, the art critic. Other members included Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. The group held radical views and outlook in their attitudes towards relationships, marriage and sexuality. They had contempt for nineteenth century morality, for conventional ways of thinking and feeling and looked for new ways of representation in literature and the arts. With the death of her mother in 1895, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Depressed by the war (World War I) and her continuing mental illness she committed suicide by drowning in the river in 1941. Major Works of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf wrote during the inter war period- the period between the Worid War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). Mrs. Dalloway is her fourth novel. Her other well known works are: The Voyage Out (1915), Jacob’s Room(1922), To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931) The Years (1937) Between the Acts (1941). “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), her well known book length essay is an important feminist text. It talks about the existence of a private space and private income as a prerequisite for the development of a woman writer’s creativity in a male dominated literary tradition. Mrs. Dalloway (1925): Some Facts Woolf originally called the novel The Hours. The novel evolved from two short stories called “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” and “The Prime Minister”. The novel is often thought to be a response to Joyce’s Ulysses. Michael Cunningham later retrieved the earlier title to write the novel The Hours which was published in 1998 and also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999.The plot focuses on three women of different generations (where one woman is Virginia Woolf) whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. In 2002, the film The Hours was made