Virginia Woolf

I both admire and take great pleasure in the writing of Virginia Woolf. I am in awe of her both as a pioneering feminist thinker and writer ("A Room of One's Own," "Three Guineas") and as a novelist ("To The Lighthouse," "The Waves"). Over the years, I have read all of her novels, some several times,and most of her published diaries, letters, and essays. The book I keep returning to is "Mrs. Dalloway." This exquisitely written novel about one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway gives readers access to a woman's mind as she moves through and absorbs her world hour by hour. The events of her day range from the very ordinary to the tragic. Woolf powerfully conveys the way life unfolds, minute by minute, and how we both experience it afresh every minute and at the same time integrate it into all of our past experiences and memories. What strikes me perhaps most of all, every time I read this masterpiece,is how Woolf so vividly shows us that at any given moment we contain all of our lives, all of our experiences, all of our histories, and that these are constantly present and in conversation with each other within our minds.