Where to start with: Virginia Woolf

As her much-loved caller Mrs Dalloway turns 100, present is simply a large clip to observe Virginia Woolf. The 20th-century modernist writer and pioneer of stream-of-consciousness narration is 1 of the astir celebrated British novelists of each time. For those looking to go much acquainted with her work, writer and professional Francesca Wade has enactment unneurotic a usher to her top hits.

The introduction point

Woolf’s fabrication often explores the narration betwixt aforesaid and society, turning connected the disjunct betwixt her characters’ backstage desires and different people’s expectations of them, and 1 of the champion examples of this is Mrs Dalloway. From its opening enactment – “Mrs Dalloway said she would bargain the flowers herself” – Woolf plunges readers into the interior thoughts of her heroine, Clarissa, a nine hostess moving errands astir London successful mentation for a enactment she’s holding that June night. Among the radical whose paths intersect with hers that June time is simply a shellshocked warfare veteran, Septimus Smith. Woolf wrote successful her diary that she wanted, successful Mrs Dalloway, to “dig retired beauteous caves” down her characters. The invisible depths and connections she creates betwixt them springiness the caller a consciousness of holding each beingness wrong it.

Emma D’Arcy arsenic Rezia successful a signifier adaptation of Mrs Dalloway astatine the Arcola theatre successful 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

Her breakthrough

Woolf’s archetypal 2 novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, are bold successful their taxable substance but comparatively accepted successful form. In December 1910, she saw Roger Fry’s post-impressionist accumulation astatine London’s Grafton Galleries, which introduced works by artists including Matisse and Cézanne to British audiences, and was filled with ideas of however to correspond the essence of a quality without aiming for a straightforward, descriptive likeness. The effect was Jacob’s Room, the caller successful which Woolf claimed she recovered her ain voice. It’s a scathing effect to the demolition of warfare – a taxable which haunts overmuch of Woolf’s penning – and a profoundly moving meditation connected the impossibility of genuinely knowing others.

The astir quotable

Woolf was a superb polemicist. Her 2 book-length feminist essays – A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas – are fascinating counterparts to her fiction. They probe the injustices that preoccupied her passim her life, displaying however “the nationalist and the backstage worlds are inseparably connected … the tyrannies and servilities of the 1 are the tyrannies and servilities of the other”. Each examines the mode radical are shaped by outer forces – class, gender, entree to acquisition – and makes a almighty lawsuit for the value of intelligence freedom. A Room of One’s Own focuses connected literature, and conjures immoderate of Woolf’s astir inspired apparitions: the “Angel successful the House”, the spectre of Victorian feminine propriety Woolf had to assassinate earlier she “plucked the bosom retired of my writing”, and Shakespeare’s anxious sister, whose talents were ne'er fixed a accidental to flourish. Three Guineas, written amid the emergence of fascism successful Europe, examines the links betwixt patriarchy and militarism: “As a woman,” Woolf writes, “I person nary country. As a pistillate I privation nary country. As a pistillate my state is the full world.”

It’s worthy persevering with

Woolf’s seventh caller The Waves has a estimation of being difficult: it unfolds, successful a rhythmic chorus of 5 voices, without immoderate of the accepted crutches of communicative oregon quality development. She told a person she had composed the caller “in a benignant of trance”. But it’s 1 of Woolf’s boldest experiments, the culmination of her explorations of the quality of cognition and the realities of interior lives, and contains immoderate of her astir beautiful, lyrical language. “I americium not acrophobic with the azygous life, but with lives together,” wrote Woolf successful an aboriginal draft. In her effort Modern Fiction, Woolf argued that the task of the novelist is to evoke the aforesaid chaos that governs life: to “record the atoms arsenic they autumn upon the mind”. With The Waves, Woolf created a signifier which would convey her characters’ experience, thoughts and impressions arsenic if successful existent time, tracing “the infinite loneliness of quality beings” portion besides gesturing astatine the anticipation of community.

If you’re successful a rush

Any postulation of Woolf’s abbreviated essays volition beryllium afloat of gems. I emotion The London Scene, afloat of sparkling observations astir the metropolis which ever energised her – its docks, its shops, its statues, its thoroughfare life. Of her galore essays connected writing, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown is simply a fantastic enactment of literate disapproval and imagination, sweeping distant the cobwebs from 19th-century realism and making the lawsuit for a new, and modern, attack to character. My favourite of each is Street Haunting, successful which an excursion to bargain a caller pencil becomes an excuse to rotation the city, gazing up into windows and imagining each the lives going connected down them. It’s the cleanable analogy for Woolf’s ain fictional method – the people-watching impulse she acquired erstwhile she archetypal moved to Bloomsbury successful 1904, and which ne'er near her.

The semipermanent project

“Observe perpetually,” reads 1 of Woolf’s past diary entries, quoting Henry James. Woolf was ever fascinated by people, and her diaries are afloat of piercing insights into herself and others. Woolf loved speechmaking diaries, and her ain lurk determination betwixt backstage and nationalist writing. Woolf’s diary was wherever she recorded Bloomsbury’s debates, parties and conversations, unleashed critiques of her friends, charted memories, practised description, analysed her ain flaws, and battled with the conflict of writing. She wrote successful her diary to “soothe the whirlpools” successful her mind: entries are by turns introspective and expansive, idiosyncratic and political. There are six volumes, covering (with immoderate gaps and elisions) the years 1897 to 1941: they are worthy speechmaking dilatory successful full, and savouring.

The masterpiece

To the Lighthouse is possibly Woolf’s astir idiosyncratic caller – written successful representation of her mother, who died erstwhile Woolf was 13, and puerility summers spent successful St Ives, Cornwall. Through the eyes of the Ramsay household and others successful their orbit – including the creator Lily Briscoe, 1 of Woolf’s astir memorable characters – Woolf explores the transition of time, the quality of instauration and the symptom of loss.