To answer that, I was. Totally. Getting through this book before London was, in a way tedious, due to the form and the narration style, it’s a tough read. However, during this trip, both during the class today and the Bloomsbury tour yesterday, I really admire and respect both Woolf and this novel as a whole.

Before yesterday I didn’t really know about the life of Virginia Woolf, but the tour yesterday really opened my eyes to a lot of things going on in both her life and the major comparisons between Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway. Both Woolf and Dalloway have similar romantic situations between there husbands and rumored female third parties, both are obviously living in the same area and roughly the same time, but most importantly both are struggling from depression (or at least some sort of mental illness with symptoms akin to depression). In a lot of ways, like I said in class, Mrs. Dalloway as a whole to me reads like an autobiographical take of Woolf herself.

So now that I’m seeing the book knowing this background information, in addition to the discussion we had on the form of the novel, I can’t help but really enjoy this novel both as a writer and as someone who sees literature as an interesting glance into a writer’s personal life.

But when I come to that conclusion, all I can think now is, what else am I missing in literature by not reading more about the author’s themselves? And possibly, should we be comparing fiction to the writer’s lives at all? Or is it detrimental to the fictional works to try and find autobiographical content within them? Is there aright answer to any of these questions, probably not as it would be different from scholar to scholar, but it’s something that I really enjoy to think about and will probably carry with me into the discussions of the short stories tomorrow ash Friday as well.