Born on 25 January 1882, Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential modernist 20th-century English writers, notable for using stream of consciousness as a literary technique in her works. While writing anonymous reviews for journals, she resolved to 're-form' the novel by experimenting with dreams and delirium. Her novel Melymbrosia, which she completed in 1912 was born out of this determination. Recast and published in 1915 as The Voyage Out, it was about a young woman's journey of selfdiscovery on her father's ship in South America. Later, she modelled many of her characters on real-life associates and acquaintances. At the onset of 1924, the Woolfs moved their residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where a relationship blossomed between the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West and Virginia. With Sackville-West, she learned to face her anxieties and overcome her nervous ailments. In fact, Orlando, a fantastical biography is partly a portrait of Vita Sackville-West. One of the most important chapters in her early life was the summer home the family visited in St Ives, Cornwall, where she first beheld the Godrevy Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse (1927) is, therefore, considered one of her most autobiographical novels. Apart from her extremely popular extended essay, 'A Room of One's Own' (1929), her other seminal works include-Mrs Dalloway (1925), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931). In 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river, aged 59. Her last work, Between the Acts, was posthumously published later that year.
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. Published in 1925, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is an incisive portrayal of a single day in the life of 51-year-old Clarissa Dalloway, the perfect high- society hostess, in post-World War I, England. As she prepares to host a party in the evening, she is flooded with memories of her youth in the countryside in Bourton, her choice of Richard Dalloway as husband over the intriguing and demanding Peter Walsh, amidst myriads of other things. A visit from Peter that morning reinforces Mrs Dalloway’s pressing need to re-examine the trajectory that her internal and external lives have taken between the pull and push of the past and present, within a certain social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway, arguably Woolf’s finest novel, was included on Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.
