Title : Stream of consciousness . Review on Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

The thing to remember about Virginia first of all is the correct spelling of her name - Woolf, not Wolf.

Like the great Romantic poets or Van Gogh, or Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf was not looking over her shoulder to decide how and what she ought to write. Her writing (I wish to write about To the Lighthouse primarily) is, though it may not seem it at first, realistic rather than romantic or sentimental. The stream of consciousness style mimics our brain's activity; are not out thoughts like flocks of starlings, skittering around the garden, rather than like an eagle soaring through the air? Only when we stop to write an essay or poem or novel, paint a picture etc., do we focus our thoughts to clear creativity. Though we may have trouble following her paragraphs content, anyone who ''read'' our minds would have the same problem. To the lighthouse describes, in the same style as Mrs. Dalloway, the occurences of one day in a guesthouse before the First World War and one day after it. The war itself fills(sic) a small insignificant part of the middle of the novel. This is at first surprising but surely women especially are more concerned with begetting life rather than ending it. I think this is what VW is trying to say to us. Another theme of the novel is the gender issue - as one of the characters repeately says: ''women cannot write or paint'' . This is her most autobiographical work in that sense; the female artist. We must credit her with an absence of the cliche, the stereotype - even the traditional plot to a degree; why should the plot be the essence of a novel? I have many criticisms of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein but the characters she created are immortal and more famous than the plot - who has actually read Frankenstein? Yet we all know the monster and his creator. VW did it her way as Emily Dickinson wrote poetry without apology to anyone and we are the richer for it.