Stream of consciousness, DYK Fact #620

[Athene_noctua]

I recently read the novel To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I enjoyed it so much – particularly the “stream of consciousness” narrative technique employed by the author – that I have started reading another of her novels, Mrs Dalloway.

This morning, I read about the Modernist novel in the spread “Symbolism, Aestheticism and Modernism” under the section Language and Literature of The Guinness Encylopedia. Did you know? “Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first wrote conventionally realistic novels, then reacted against realism based on the overseeing viewpoint of the author. Her novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) use the narrative method known as ‘stream of consciousness’, which shows ‘reality’ as it flows through the minds of her characters – steeped in currents of memory, anticipation, feeling and thought.” I gather that James Joyce has also used this narrative style – but, according to what I have just read in my Encyclopedia, credit for the “greatest novel of this kind” should belong to Marcel Proust’s monumental work Ŕ la recherche du temps perdu.

[shygeorge]

I have just read about stream of consciousness in the ART, MUSIC AND LITERATURE section of the Bloomsbury Concise Encyclopedia. Did you know? The term was coined by William James.

[shyvera]

Did you know? Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando (1928) was one of the books recommended by writer Jeanette Winterson in one programme in the series "My Life in Books" shown on BBC Two earlier this year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z7sgp

[shygeorge]

Did you know? [Adeline] Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), whom I have just read about in the FAMOUS PEOPLE section of the Bloomsbury Concise Encyclopedia, was not just a novelist but also a critic.

[shyvera]

Did you know? Her father Sir Leslie Stephen, who was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, was also a critic, while her husband Leonard Woolf was a political theorist and her sister Vanessa Bell was a painter.

[shygeorge]

Did you know? Both Virginia and Vanessa belonged to a group of artists, writers and intellectuals living and working in the Bloomsbury area of London in the early decades of the 20th century. I have just read about Bloomsbury Group in the ART, MUSIC AND LITERATURE section of the Bloomsbury Concise Encyclopedia.

[shyvera]

Did you know? Other members of the Bloomsbury Group included the critic Lytton Strachey, the painter Roger Fry, the novelist E.M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the lesbian Vita Sackville-West – who had an affair with Virginia Woolf herself!