Born Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Thus, she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and, apart from a few courses at King's College, London, her education consisted of private Greek lessons and, above all, access to her father's exceptional library. The death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was only 13, affected her deeply and brought about her first nervous breakdown. She then began to revolt against her father's aggressive and tyrannical character and his idealisation of the domesticated woman.
It was only with her father's death, in 1904, that Virginia felt free to begin her own life and literary career. She decided to move to Bloomsbury, and, together with her sister, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant-garde of early 20th-century London. For these writers, artists and thinkers, the common denominators were a contempt for traditional morality and Victorian respectability, a rejection of artistic convention and a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes. They bore anti-war, socialism and unconventional sexual practice.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf and in 1915 she published The Voyage Out, her first novel. During this period she entered a nursing home and attempted suicide by taking drugs. In 1925 the novel Mrs Dalloway appeared, in which Virginia successfully experimented with new narrative techniques. It was followed by To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). Virginia was also a very talented literary critic and a brilliant essayist, as her volume of literary essays, The Common Reader (1925), shows. In 1929 she delivered two lectures at Cambridge University, which later became A Room of One's Own, a work of great impact on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In it she explored many issues connected with women and writing but above all insisted on the inseparable link between economic and artistic independence. In 1929 she began to work on her novel The Waves (1931). World War II increased her anxiety. She became haunted by the terror of losing her mind. In the end, in 1941 she drowned herself in the River Ouse.
Virginia was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. the omniscient narrator disappeared, and the point of view shifted inside the different characters' minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas as well as momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
At 10 a.m. on a Wednesday early in June of 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist of the novel, goes to Bond Street to buy some flowers for a party she is giving that evening at her house. While she is in the flower shop, a car drives noisily past and shifts the attention to the street, where Septimus and Lucrezia Warren Smith are walking: he is an estate agent's clerk and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I ,she is an Italian girl. Septimus's mental disorder has necessitated the calling in of doctors, first Dr Holmes and now Sir William Bradshaw, a famous nerve specialist. Clarissa walks-back home and there she receives an unexpected visit from Peter Walsh, the man she used to love in her youth. He then leaves Clarissa's house and goes to Regent's Par, where he catches a glimpse of the Warren Smiths, who are going to Sir William Bradshaw's for an interview. The interview lasts three-quarters of an hour and results in Sir William's arranging for Septimus to go into one of his clinics, At 6 p.m. Septimus jumps out of the window of his room, and the ambulance carrying his body passes by Peter Walsh, who is going back to his hotel. All the characters who have been in some way important during the day are present at Clarissa's party. The Bradshaws arrive and Clarissa hears from them of Septimus's death, with which she feels a strong connection.
Like Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day in June. The novel follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the morning to the evening of the day on which she gives a large formal party. Woolf does not elevate her characters to the level of myth, but shows their deep humanity behind their social mask.
Clarissa is a London society lady of 51, the wife of a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has extremely conventional views on politics and women's rights. She is characterised by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness. Her life appears to be an effort towards order and peace. Septimus Warren Smith is a young poet and lover of Shakespeare who, when the war broke out, enlisted for patriotic reasons. He is an extremely sensitive man who can suddenly fall prey to panic and fear or feelings of guilt. There is no connection between Clarissa and Septimus in the plot, apart from the news of his death at her party. However, they are similar in many respects: their response to experience is always given in physical terms and they depend upon their partners for stability and protection. Yet there is a fundamental difference which has contradicted the theory that Septimus is Clarissa's double. He is not always able to distinguish between his personal response and external reality.
The novel deals with the way people react to new situations, and provides an insight into some of the most significant changes in the social life of the time, for instance the spread of newspapers, the increasing use of cars and planes, the new standards in the marital relationship, the success of the cinema. She also adopts a motif - the striking of Big Ben and of clocks in general - which acts both as a structural connection and as a symbol of the awareness of death. As for James Joyce, also for Virginia Woolf subjective reality came to be identified with the 'stream-of-consciousness' technique. However, differently from Joyce's characters, who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way, Virginia never lets her characters' thoughts flow without control, and she maintains logical and grammatical organisation. Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third person, past tense narrative. Thus she gives the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. Similar to Joyce's 'epiphanies' are Woolf's 'moments of being’, rare occasions of insight during the characters' daily life when they can see reality behind appearances.