Like her contemporaries, Joyce and Lawrence, Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the
complex inner world of feeling and memory . Her contribution to modernism is an important one
and is made clear by a brilliant statement contained in her essay MODERN FICTION (1919): “
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind in an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of
impressions… Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end”. THE EVENTS THAT
TRADITIONALLY MAKE UP A STORY ARE NO LONGER IMPORTANT.
What matters is the impression they make on the character who experiences them. In Woolf’s
novels the omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shifts inside the character’s mind
through flashbacks, association of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.
