Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, first published in 1925, charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prosperous member of London society, as she prepares to throw a party. Woolf explained in her diary what she had set out to do: ‘I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity. I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense.’ Celebrated for its innovative narrative technique and distillation of many of the preoccupations of 1920s Britain, Mrs Dalloway is now seen as a landmark of 20th-century fiction, and one of the finest products of literary modernism. Melvyn Bragg is joined by Professor Dame Hermione Lee, President of Wolfson College, Oxford; Jane Goldman, Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and Kathryn Simpson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
(9 min) Wolf experiments with stream of consciousness. (Non Linear, with strong plot)
Is it first or third person? Who is speaking in this paragraph?
She is shifting from external to internal descriptions.
She writes about mental illness (bipolar disorder) in the person of a Veteran (32 min). She writes about how mental illness is treated.
The Walking Cure: Talking to Cheryl
The American Dream, for instance, is a fantasy of self-reliance, but our culture is iffy on self-reliant women.
.. It is as if only the total destruction of the domestic sphere could justify a woman’s presence on such adventures. Or rather — since Strayed’s story is not fabricated — it is as if that destruction were necessary in order to secure the audience’s sympathy for a woman doing something risky and alone.
.. As a genre, writing about the wilderness — nature writing — is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged, counterintuitively, during the Industrial Revolution, when everything about the rural past became an object of nostalgic interest, and nature came under threat for the first time in history. In response, people started forming a new set of relations with the natural world. Masses of amateur scientists began to observe, collect, and taxonomize it; proto-environmentalists began to sound the alarm about it; and Romantics began to romanticize it. Nature writing as we understand it today reflects, in varying degrees, all three of those traditions.
.. Wild succeeded in part because it channels so many of our oldest and most broadly shared stories. Strayed is an orphan cast out into the world; she is a bootstrapper lifting herself out of poverty; she is a pilgrim walking to salvation; she is even a pioneer, going West to grow up with the country. But her book’s deepest power might come from a different and even more time-honored journey: that of a daughter becoming a mother — in this case, implicitly, to us all. The journey Strayed recounts in Wild culminates when she learns to love herself as her mother no longer can. And that kind of love — extravagant, unwavering, undiminishable — is what she offers to her readers, and urges us to find in ourselves.
‘Animal Farm’: What Orwell Really Meant
Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt).1