Richard, her present husband, is unlike him, for he respects her soul and allows her privacy in her attic-room. She rejected Peter Walsh, whom she loved passionately and whom she still loves intensely, because she found him too possessive, domineering and assertive, who would not have allowed her any privacy of soul, any spiritual independence. Her love-experiences are particularly exposed. She is shown at the critical moments in her life through her consciousness and of others with whom she is related, and thus a rounded and well-built up personality in her is vividly presented. The frame-work of time in which the novel is encompassed is narrow, but within it “by means of the contacts she makes and the memories they evoke in her and in others, her life-story from her girlhood to her present age of fifty is gradually unfolded”.

The action of the novel relates to a single day in the month of June, on which she is proposing to give a party in the evening. Affecting and affected by others with whom she comes into contact. The basic theme of the novel is the life of a single personality, Mrs. When her characters see life as a luminous halo they reach the moments of illumination, not before or after. In the words of Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader, “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”. Dalloway to show that the experiences of individuals are combined to form a single, indeterminate whole and when one has come to realize this then he attains understanding and insight. Reality is in a state of constant movement, flux, transition, duration, and experience has no impediment, the whole human experience in a flux is one. Life, to Virginia Woolf, as it was to Bergson, is a spiritual force, a vital impetus, equal to pure as distinct from the chronological time and equal to human consciousness when that consciousness attains to awareness not measurable by any amount of chronological time or space. According to Bernard Blackstone, “The theme of Virginia Woolf’s novels is often precisely this: the patient effort of the woman towards the reintegration of man.” Theme of Time

Mrs dalloway by virginia woolf