1. Modernism, Literature and the Feminist Perspective
Virginia Woolf
Modernism, Literature and the Feminist Perspective

2. Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, c.1912

3. The Stephen Family in 1894

5. Bloomsbury Years

6. Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes

7. Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, 1912

9. Woolf and the Dreadnought hoax 1910

10. Virginia and Leonard Woolf

11. Poster for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, London, 1910

12. Roger Fry, self-portrait
Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry, The Hogarth Press, 1940
Roger Fry, self-portrait

14. A Room of One’s Own
Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in the protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding…

15. A Room of One’s Own
but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

16. A Room of One’s Own
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.

17. Modernism in Literature
Rejection of tradition, Victorian values
Experimental: Fragmented, non-representational, anti-realist
No definite plot and sense of progress
New narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, interior monologue, intertexuality

18. Modernism in Literature
Themes related to the psyche: self-alienation, self-reflexivity, emancipation, representation of human subjectivity
Making art equivalent to life
Challenging, unsettling and discomforting effect on reader

19. Stream of Consciousness

20. Stream of Consciousness
20th century narrative mode
Expresses flow of character’s thoughts and emotions
Like being inside the character’s mind

21. Woolf’s Innovation Experimental story telling
Use of Stream of Consciousness
Use of historical past and its renewal

22. Stream of Consciousness
"She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself."
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925