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Mrs Dalloway Character Analysis

Decent Essays

Virginia Woolf expressed herself through her characters. Her mental health and private life are shown very clear through Septimus Warren Smith, the main Character in Mrs. Dalloway. He is a war veteran who suffers from PTSD. Woolf is an author who suffers from many mental breakdowns throughout her life. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus and Woolf are connected through their mental state because they both hear things and struggle to connect to the world around them.
Virginia Woolf is thought to have bipolar II disorder. As a young child, her eldest brother sexually abused her. She had three major breakdowns and was hospitalized for one of them. She endured many deaths in her early years. The Sudden death of her mother in 1895 and two years later the death of half-sister, Stella, in 1897, lead to Woolf’s first mental breakdown from ages 13-16 (Woolf). Later in her early adult years, her father passed away in 1904 and 1907 her beloved brother, Thoby, passes away; these deaths caused her second breakdown (Woolf). In 1913,less than a year after being married, she falls into her third and final mental breakdown (Woolf). Woolf was said to never fully recover from her 1913 mental breakdown. During the years of 1910-1913, Woolf sent on a ‘rest cure’ in Twickenham to a private nursing home for women with nervous conditions (Woolf). Before the final downfall of Virginia she was on her way to becoming a well-known author. She was apart of the Bloomsbury group. A quote from her famous book Mrs. Dalloway, “ It achieves it is the vision of reality through the reception by Mrs. Dalloway’s mind of what Virginia Woolf called those myriad impressions- trivial fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel”(“Virginia Stephen Woolf”). Although people raved about her novels, she could never feel the joy in her success. In 1915 as was recorded to be considered her good years, happily married, publishes her first novel, Leonard and Woolf have plans to make their own printing press (Woolf). Even though to the public her life seems to be everything she could have wished, it was slowly taking it’s turn for the worst. The 26th of March in 1915 she Publishes “ Voyage Out” and enters a Nursing home for the next six months

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