Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) Read Free

collection of Woolf’s autobiographical writings,
Moments of Being
. Withdrawing with Leonard to Monk’s House in Sussex, where they could see the German airplanes flying low overhead on their way to bomb London, Woolf continued to write for peace and correspond with antiwar activists in Europe and the United States. She began to write her last novel,
Between the Acts
, in the spring of 1938, but by early 1941 was dissatisfied with it. Before completing her final revisions, Woolf ended her own life, walking into the River Ouse on the morning of March 28, 1941. To her sister, Vanessa, she wrote, “I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know.” In her last note to Leonard, she told him he had given her “complete happiness,” and asked him to destroy all her papers.
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    B Y THE END of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf had become an iconic figure, a touchstone for the feminism that revived in the 1960s as well as for the conservative backlash of the 1980s. Hailed by many as a radical writer of genius, she has also been dismissed as a narrowly focused snob. Her image adorns T-shirts, postcards, and even a beer advertisement, while phrases from her writings occur in all kinds of contexts, from peace-march slogans to highbrow book reviews. That Woolf is one of those figures upon whom the myriad competing narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western culture inscribe themselves is testified to by the enormous number of
biographical works about her published in the decades since her nephew Quentin Bell broke the ground in 1972 with his two-volume biography of his aunt.
    Argument continues about the work and life of Virginia Woolf: about her experience of incest, her madness, her class attitudes, her sexuality, the difficulty of her prose, her politics, her feminism, and her legacy. Perhaps, though, these words from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” are our best guide: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
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    â€”M ARK H USSEY , G ENERAL E DITOR

C HRONOLOGY
    Information is arranged in this order: 1. Virginia Woolf’s family and her works; 2. Cultural and political events; 3. Significant publications and works of art.
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1878       
Marriage of Woolf’s parents, Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth (née Jackson) (1846–1895). Leslie Stephen publishes
Samuel Johnson
, first volume in the English Men of Letters series. England at war in Afghanistan.
 
 

 
 
1879       
Vanessa Stephen (Bell) born (d. 1961). Edward Burne-Jones paints Julia Stephen as the Virgin Mary in
The Annunciation
. Leslie Stephen,
Hours in a Library
, 3rd series.
Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall Colleges for women founded at Oxford University.
Anglo-Zulu war in South Africa.
 
 

 
 
1880       
Thoby Stephen born (d. 1906).
William Gladstone becomes prime minister for second time. First Boer War begins (1880–81). Deaths of Gustave Flaubert (b. 1821) and George Eliot (b. 1819). Lytton Strachey born (d. 1932).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
.
 
 

 
 
1881       
Leslie Stephen buys lease of Talland House, St. Ives, Cornwall.
Cambridge University Tripos exams opened to women. Henrik Ibsen,
Ghosts
; Henry James,
The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square
; Christina Rossetti,
A Pageant and Other Poems
; D. G. Rossetti,
Ballads and Sonnets
; Oscar Wilde,
Poem
.
 
 

 
 
1882       
Adeline Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf) born January 25. Leslie Stephen begins work as editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
; publishes
The Science of Ethics
. The Stephen family spends its first summer at