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Descending from the intellectual aristocracy, Woolf is one of the most noteworthy novelists of the twentieth century. She was the one who tried to give a new direction to the English novel with a new spiritual awareness.
She was a novelist of distinction and an artist who whatever her dependence upon tradition had something original to say and who surpassed most of her contemporaries in sensitive fidelity to the most evanescent moments of conscious. Virginia’s style of writing has invented something new which takes a break from tradition and conventional conceptions of the novel; she entirely rejected and replaced all the old notions of writings. She gave more emphasis on incident, external description, and straight forward narrative by an overriding concern with the character presentation by the Stream of consciousness method. The way Proust introduced something new into French fiction, likewise Virginia Woolf done into English.
Her novels has no plot, no love interests, no comedy, no tragedy she believes the purpose of the novels are not to preach doctrines, sing song, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, but record and reveal the atoms of consciousness. She once said.
“I want to give life and death sanity and insanity”
(Batchelor)
Her dominant themes are Time and the absolute, life and death, confusion and order, singleness and oneness. Instead of narrating events and scenes, she gives to her readers’ subtle inlets into the consciousness of human beings, scenes and moments communicated by the method of the monologue have taken the place of events. She abandoned the character drawing.
Virginia’s main intention is to bring the readers close to the mind. She believes that the readers should be more concerned with inner reality rather than outer. This is what known as stream of consciousness technique. Readers are introduced into inner life of a character by means of interior monologue. There is very little intervention in the way of explanation or commentary on the part of the novelist. This has been done by her with skillful use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue because of these techniques she has been able to take readers directly into the minds of her characters and shows the flow ideas, sensations and impression there, and in this way she brings us closer to their psyche than can ever be possible by the use of conventional methods of characterization.
In order to enrich her language, she has used vivid metaphors and symbols which are peculiar to poetry. Her language seems to be like a poetry, her prose style has the assonance, the refrain the rhythms, and the accents of poetry itself. Her novels have the intensity and immediacy of a lyric, and this intensity is achieved by providing them with a narrow– framework.
Woolf is a spiritualist as contrasted with the materialists like Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells and Galsworthy. She rejects traditional modes of expression and concentrates her attention on the rendering of inner truths. For her the novels are not just for entertainment or propaganda or the vehicle of some fixed ideas or theories, or a social document, but a voyage of exploration to find out how life is lived, and how it can be rendered as it is actually lived without distortion. She has an original vision of the life and she was very truthful to this vision
David Cecil calls Virginia Woolf one of the most satisfying of aesthetes. It is her sense of beauty which imparts form and pattern to her novels. She founds beauty in every little object of nature. The ugly, the unpleasant too, is brought in, but only to serve as a foil to the beautiful. Whatever repellent and disgust serves in her novels to heighten by contrasts the fascination of the beautiful. In fact she observes beauty even in the most unlikely places, and her treatment of beauty is not all serious and rhapsodic. Bringing humor in treating the novel is also one of the major contributions from her side.
Virginia’s emphasis was never on good and evil characters but always on happy and sad behavior of them. She has always shown a very small world of people like herself, a small class, a dying class - the middle class. She believes that the real interesting occurrences are the occurrences in the mind like action, whether it be the shock of a thrown body on a polo-field, or the mandarin – nodding recurrence of the breakfast, shopping, walking in the park, tea, dinner, drawing-room and bed, action in this wide view, half seen, swaying background to the mind, like example later in a brief summary of the Novel Mrs Dalloway, it can be seen that there is a content of madness and violent death, love and heart break, the ruin of career, and the full late of several lives, - but these things happen in the mind, or at any rate are seen through the screen of the mind.
She believes that all novels deal with character. Woolf is genius in writing prose. If readers will read her novels they will feel that there is music in it or it can be said each or her novel is composed like a piece of music, proceeding note by note, phrase by phrase, with crescendos and diminuendos, that beat of time being actually marked by the voice of Big Ben. She is not only serious as the author, but has gaiety and insidious irony in the picture of her novels with tenderness too.
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