"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at
work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf's provocative
statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway
has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it
highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different
from the traditional picture of the "poetic" novelist
concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and
with following the intricate pathways of individual
consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well
as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a
visionary: literary critics'cavalier dismissal of Woolf's
social vision will not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the
questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by
their social environments, how historical forces impinge
on people's lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to
determine people's fates. Most of her novels are rooted in
a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise
historical time.