- follows Clarissa Dalloway throughout a single day in post-Great War England in a stream of consciousness narrative-style
- basic story is Clarissa's preparations for a party she is to host that evening
Beginning:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy mangonel flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. Mangonel doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
Important quotes:
1. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.
2. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
3. This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
4. Clarissa had a theory in those days . . . that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps—perhaps.
5. She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.
To the Lighthouse
Characters:
- Mr and Mrs Ramsay
- Lily Briscoe
- Charles Tansley
Plot summary:
- divided into 3 parts
- Part 1: The Window:
- "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added."
- Ramsay family is spending their summer in their second home in the Hebrides
- James Ramsay asks his father to take him to the lighthouse, but his father dashes his hopes
- Ramsays are joined by a number of friends, including Lily Briscoe, who begins the novel as a young uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs Ramsay. She is taunted by Charles Tansley, an admirer of Mr. Ramsay and his philosophical treatises.
- The section closes with a large dinner party where Mr Ramsay snaps at Augustus Carmichael when the latter asks for more soup. Mrs Ramsay is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two guests she brought together in engagement, arrive late to dinner as Minta lost her grandmother's brooch on the beach.
- Part 2: Time Passes
- one of the Ramsay's sons, Andrew, is killed in action
- their daughter, Prue, dies giving birth to her first child
- Mrs. Ramsay passes away suddenly, leaving Mr. Ramsay adrift without her there to praise and comfort him
- Part 3: To the Lighthouse
- the remaining Ramsays return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part 1
- Mr Ramsay plans on taking the trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Camilla
- Lily finally finishes her painting and learns that the execution of her vision is more important to her than leaving some sort of legacy in her work
A Room of One's Own
- examines whether women were capable of producing work the quality of William Shakespeare
- invents a fictional "Shakespeare's sister", Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women
- examines the careers of several women authors including Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot
- invented the term "Oxbridge"
- title comes from Woolf's conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed a space of her own in which to work and earn enough money to support herself
- also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art
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