Tal y como viene siendo habitual en la obra de Virginia Woolf, en?Al Faro? no se descubre nada nuevo para los incondicionales de la autora. Tanto en el argumento como en la técnica narrativa se pueden encontrar elementos comunes: personajes atormentados e insatisfechos consigo mismos y con la realidad que les ha tocado vivir, paisajes agrestes y desfavorables para la convivencia y habitabilidad humana, y la novedosa utilización de la tercera persona y del reproducción de los pensamientos de los protagonistas. Este hecho puede dificultar la lectura a los no duchos en la materia, lo que no le quita un ápice a la tensión narrativa, al contrario, quizás se deba prestar más atención y leer con más tranquilidad. Apenas hay separación entre los participantes de un diálogo, sino que se reproducen literalmente lo que se les pasa por la cabeza, puede dar la sensación de que no hay contacto físico entre los individuos, lo que lleva al desconcierto y a darle a la incomunicación una importancia aún mayor. La señora Ramsay planea hacer una excursión a un faro con sus ocho hijos y algunos amigos, pero el mal tiempo y la autoridad de un marido prepotente hará que sus planes se deshagan, lo que supone un enfrentamiento entre los miembros de la familia contra el señor Ramsay. La excursión podría interpretarse como una viaje?iniciático?, una válvula de escape ante la opresión, una huida en busca de la verdad por una mismo. En cuanto a los personajes suelen repetirse los mismos roles que tanto obsesiona a la autora: la mujer,?realizada? como madre de familia numerosa, pero frustrada a nivel intelectual por la sociedad machista de la época victoriana, la estigmatización de la solterona,?obligada? a elegir entre la búsqueda de su felicidad, materializada en su cultivo profesional, pero casi siempre abandonada por?el qué dirán?, la figura del hombre, que aparece como una figura paternalista,?ejecutor? del carácter más rebelde y sublime de la mujer. Y, en cuanto los fenómenos atmosféricos, el mar, las tempestades, el viento… todos aliados en la eterna lucha de sexos, en la incompatibilidad, en la incomunicación… Esposas rebeldes de pensamiento pero no de acción, mujeres que luchan por defender su valía, no sólo en el campo de la maternidad, individuos que oprimen, otros que son oprimidos…Todo tejido en todo a la complejidad del carácter de Virginia Wolf, que, o desconcierta y engancha, o harta. Pero que, sobre todo, no pasa desapercibida…

Flush es un `cocker spaniel` de orejas largas, cola ancha y unos `ojos atónitos color avellana`. A los pocos meses de su nacimiento es regalado a la ya famosa poestisa Elizabeth Barret. Fluxh se convertirá en su compañero inseparable y, posteriormente, en el cómplice de sus amoríos con el poeta Robert Browning, aunque primero debe superar la animadversión y los celos que siente ante su afortunado rival

Virgina Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) presents a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class English woman. Clarissa Dalloway is the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative Member of Parliament. The story takes place in London on a day in June 1923, a day when Clarissa is giving a dinner party. She walks to the florist shop to buy flowers for the party. Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia happen to be walking on the street. Septimus Warren Smith never meets Mrs. Dalloway, but their lives are connected by external events, such as the sight of an airplane overhead, and by the fact that they are both sensitive people who feel empty. Richard Dalloway is invited to lunch at the home of Lady Millicent Bruton, a fashionable aristocrat. Lady Bruton dabbles in charities and social reform, and is sponsoring a plan to have young men and women travel to Canada. Peter Walsh, an old and close friend of Clarissa’s, has returned to England after five years in India, and comes to visit her. Peter Walsh once loved Clarissa, but she had refused to marry him. Clarissa introduces Peter to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth is 17 years old, and has an older friend and tutor named Doris Kilman. Elizabeth goes to lunch with Miss Kilman. Miss Kilman is poor and physically unattractive, and resents the upper-class Mrs.Dalloway. Miss Kilman is a desperate and fanatically religious woman, who wants to take Elizabeth away from her mother, but conceals her feeling under the guise of religiosity and strident charity. Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide the same day that Mrs. Dalloway is giving her dinner party. Sally Seton, a good friend of Clarissa’s whom she has not seen for years, unexpectedly appears at Clarissa’s dinner party. Sally Seton is now Lady Rosseter, and has five sons. Peter and Sally talk at the party, and Sally wonders if Clarissa is happy. Peter admits that he could never love anyone else as he had loved Clarissa, and as the novel ends he realizes that he feels an extraordinary excitement at seeing her. Clarissa Dalloway as a character in the novel is upper-class and conventional. She knows her life is shallow; her former lover Peter Walsh had called her the perfect hostess. She feels that her only gift is in knowing people by instinct. Clarissa is unsure about her daughter’s love for her. She is also unsure about her own feelings toward her husband Richard, and toward her former fiancé Peter Walsh. Her feelings toward Peter are ambivalent; she had loved him, but he had not offered her stability or social standing. She regards Peter as a failure, and it is because he knows this that he bursts into tears when he meets her. She kisses him, and comforts him. Clarissa had refused to marry Peter because of his self-centered unconventionality. She had married Richard, because he was dependable and represented security and stability. Clarissa loves success, hates discomfort, and has a need to be liked. She is attracted to both men and women (she had fallen in love with her former friend Sally Seton). Clarissa has had a recent illness, and takes an hour’s rest after luncheon. She thinks about death. A theme of the novel is the conflict between conventionality and unconventionality. Clarissa chooses conventionality, rather than following her true feelings, and is left empty and unsure of herself. Peter Walsh chooses unconventionality, and is left feeling aimless and unsuccessful. Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide to escape being crushed by the forces of conventionality. The novel is in part a critique of the shallowness and superficial conventionality of upper-class English society. Another theme of the novel is that the thoughts of individuals are connected in a way that transcends their separation or alienation. Woolf uses a stream-of-consciousness technique to connect the thoughts of her characters. The novel is a continuous narrative, not divided into chapters or sections, although Woolf noted some of the shifts in time or scene by a short blank space in her manuscript. The thoughts of characters such as Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are connected by external events in the world, such as the sound of a motorcar, or the sight of an airplane in the sky, or the sound of the Big Ben clock as it strikes the hour. Woolf shows that the thoughts of individuals can be connected in a way that reveals a unity in human existence, an exciting world of possibility

Introduction One does not have to read very much of To the Lighthouse before one realizes that Woolf has chosen here a very particular style, a way of telling the story which exerts a strange and compelling effect upon the reader. In this lecture I wish to focus upon some aspects of this style in order to consider some of the ways in which a few very important aspects of what this novel has to reveal are directly linked to the author's decisions about point of view and language. One of my major purposes in this lecture is to offer some suggestions about why we might consider Woolf a major modernist writer and link her to other modernist artists we have been considering in Liberal Studies, even to those who, at first glance perhaps, don't seem to share quite the same style: Kafka, Eliot, and certain modern painters. I shall be trying to establish as my major point the idea that what does link Woolf to these other modernists is the way in which her style compels us to recognize a fundamental problem of modern life: the deep and apparently unbridgeable dichotomy between the fragmented inner world of the self and any sense of coherent order to the world beyond the self, that is, the world of human relationships, of nature, of society as a totality. The Power of Style: An Example However, before moving to such large concerns, I would like to consider a particular example, selected almost at random, from an early part of the book. This particular example is part of a description of Mrs Ramsay; it occurs on p. 15 of our edition: All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the pages of the Stores list in the hope that she might come upon something like a rake, or a mowing machine, which, with its prongs and its handles, would need the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young men parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said it would be a positive tornado. But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you-I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow-this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror. The first thing we notice about this style, I suspect, is the extraordinary sentence structure. The second paragraph contains a sentence of 260 words, a sentence which, in effect, is a single complex sentence of 32 words enormously embellished by parenthetical phrases and clauses, modifying phrases, and a whole rich array of various grammatical constructions. These hold up the full meaning of the sentence and transform it from something clear and straightforward into something delayed, qualified, uncertain, and (for the reader) much more difficult to assimilate. If we examine closely the structure of that long sentence, we see that the main clause begins with an indication of the subject (the gruff murmur) but that any further development of that clause is held up for nine lines, so that we get a range of associations and modifying phrases describing that murmur. Thus, by the time we get to the main verb (had ceased) we have gone through a range of emotional associations connected to the initial subject. The meanings of the words and, most important, the rhythm of the sentence establish the extent to which Mrs Ramsay's mood is dependent upon the semi-conscious absorption of what is going on around her. She cannot hear what people are saying, but the very presence of the regular activity provides for her a comforting reassurance of domestic order. Thus, the structure of the sentence itself presents the central issue of Mrs Ramsay's character, that she is constantly dependent upon the existence of family rituals all around her, that, although she may not participate directly in them or even be fully aware of what is going on, she relies upon such a background sense of ongoing domestic order to sustain her tranquil mood. The strongest word in the entire sentence is the final word terror. It injects into what has seemed a slow meandering through a number of quotidian details a sudden emotional urgency. We can ask ourselves an obvious question: Why does Woolf not simply present the main clauses and thus deliver the full thought much more simply? After all, isn't the main point here that Mrs Ramsay's mood changes suddenly in an unwelcome way? It's clear, of course, what would be lost immediately, namely, the sense that the subject (Mrs Ramsay) is not, any more than anyone else is, capable of such a firm declarative thought process. What goes on in her mind, from one moment to the next, is something much more complex than any such simple declaration would illustrate. More about this later. We notice, too, how almost all the details of this style focus our attention upon what is going on in Mrs Ramsay's mind. We do learn some external details about what she is doing and where she is sitting, but these details are clearly subordinated to the most obvious content of the sentences: the details passing through Mrs Ramsay's consciousness as she sits and stares at a magazine, half-listening to the children playing and the men talking nearby. In other words, there's an interplay here between the external world and Mrs Ramsay's inner consciousness of that world, but the emphasis is very much on the latter rather than on the former. That is clear from the fact that, although we have a very clear idea of what Mrs Ramsay is feeling, we have no exact idea of her position, so exact that we could paint the scene with more or less the same shared details. Such a style, in other words, forces us to recognize the preeminence of the inner life in the ongoing drama of a human existence. Many readers comment that this style is wonderful because that's how people in fact think. But of course this is nonsense. No one thinks in such superbly polished prose, taking care, clause by clause or phrase by phrase, that all the antecedents are appropriately positioned and the modifiers clear. No, if people thought like this, then English teachers would be out of a job. What Woolf is attempting here clearly is not to reproduce the thought process itself but to develop a symbolic equivalent of thought, to use her command of English prose style to create for us in the rhythm, structure, and accumulation of detail in the sentence an emotional illumination of Mrs Ramsay's consciousness. A comparison here with symbolist painting may be in order. It's clear that many symbolist painters justified their style with reference to dreams and dream analysis. But no one dreams a symbolist painting. What the symbolist (like, say, Dali) is doing is using his art to create for the viewer the emotional equivalent of dreams, to get us to recognize in the art something analogous to a dream experience. But in creating such symbols, the painter, like Woolf, is doing something very sophisticated and simply beyond the world of how people really think and how they dream. The structure of the sentence, of course, does a good deal more than simply emphasize the importance of the inner life of Mrs Ramsay. It also characterizes that inner life in a curious way that is sustained for all of the characters in the novel. We can summarize this briefly by observing that characteristically the people in this novel, as in the above example, cannot complete a simple and coherent thought without a host of other impressions, memories, feelings, images, qualifications, and possibilities crowding in upon the mind. In this one sentence, for example, we are taken from the initial sense that something has happened (the opening of that sentence) through all of Mrs Ramsay's impressions of what is going on around her with her family into her sense of nature beyond the family-a sense that includes the contradictory sensations of solace and dread and leads to some momentary impression of the nature of life itself as ephemeral, subject only to the cruel dictates of time. Thus, before the sentence closes, the details have placed this thought amid a welter of other thoughts crowding Mrs Ramsay's mind for attention. And in an instant, the peaceful scene has been transformed into one characterized by the last word: terror. Nothing we recognize as very significant has changed in the external scene, but that isn't the point. The essential quality of life here is inner, and in that inner world the emotional changes can be abrupt, unexpected, and extreme. There is nothing particularly dramatic in the external scene; it is about as tranquil and unthreatening as a domestic scene might be-a family at play and rest. Yet there is an intense inner drama amid all this mundane detail. Woolf does not tell us that the

A collection of stories by British writer Virginia Woolf: The Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, Solid Objects, An Unwritten Novel, A Haunted House, Monday or Tuesday, The String Quartet, Society, Blue and Green, In the Orchard, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, A Woman's College From Outside, The New Dress, Moments of Being, The Lady in the Looking-Glass, The Shooting Party, The Duchess and The Jeweller, Lappin and Lappinova, The Man Who Loved His Kind, The Searchlight, The Legacy, Together and Apart, A Summing Up