Clarissa Dalloway originally appeared as a minor character in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and recurred in five of Woolf's later short stories (most notably "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," which was converted into the opening of the novel. However, her character is given much more depth and made more sympathetic in the novel than in any of Woolf's previous works. The novel's emphasis on inner monologue and the digressiveness of thought was a tendency that appeared in its immediate predecessor, Jacob's Room (1922), but was largely absent from her first two novels, which followed the traditional mold of Victorian novelists like Jane Austen more closely.
This experimental...
