Who is Mary Seton this story?

Mary Seton is, like Mary Beton and Mary Carmichael, a persona whom the reader can assume to be a narrator of Woolf s text. She is also, like these other two Marys, a fictional personage within the book. In fact, Mary Seton is two fictional personages: In her first guise, she is a friend of the narrator in chapter one, a woman with whom the narrator chats after a dinner at the women's college. But, in this same portion of chapter one, Mary Seton is also the name given to the first Mary Seton's mother. As the mother of Mary Seton, she is a typical, traditional woman, who, unlike her daughter, did not attend college or work for women's rights.