ABSTRACT
All that Virginia Woolf has been moving towards, all that has been, as it were, gathering force below the narrative surface of her two ‘traditional’ novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, or that has been investigated and in part denied in the authorial intrusions of her third novel, Jacob’s Room, comes into its own to find satisfactory expression in the three novels of her middle period. They are generally considered to be her best works. In these novels, inner and outer, the factual and visionary, intellect and feeling, and other related dichotomies achieve a satisfying unity. Vision is expressed through form, and the verbal texture of the works explores and expresses that vision and reinforces the form. The ‘rhythmic order’ of Mrs. Dalloway, as we have seen, rises from and expresses the ‘unity of consciousness’. There is, in other words, a unity at the level of the novel’s verbal texture, and also an inner or deeper structure of implication and meaning. But the different layers are also unified. This kind of ‘unity’ is essentially ‘poetic’.
