I have studied Virginia Woolf for many years. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the author of “To the Lighthouse”, “Mrs. Dalloway”, “The Waves” ,entitled ” Virginia Woolf and the Problems of Time in the English Novel” and submitted it successfully in 1964 at the University of Paris (The Sorbonne). It was the time when the students at the Sorbonne were most familiar with English fiction “between the Wars”, and were captivated by its close relations with philosophical themes such as “duration”, the “interior monologue”, the ” stream of consciousness” resulting from the writings of Henri Bergson.

We gave up “characters”, “narrative”, even  the “plot”, and focused on what is going on in our consciousness, gauging the depths and wealth of the stream of thoughts, sensations, memories, that started with our birth, and may only end with our death.

Virginia Woolf, with the fluidity of her sentences, purity of her chosen words, gave us novels the thrill of seeing the glittering beauty of human consciousness, the gleam of what a minute may contain in love, terror, apprehension, decisions and indecisions…

Time, not chronology, duration, not the clock. A new venture in fiction where the author creates at every moment instants pregnant with eternity.

Virginia Woolf far more than James Joyce succeeded in showing us the internal monologue that gives meaning to the life we live.