Point of View

The book maintains a first person point of view throughout, although it is alternately told from the points of view of Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, and Laura Brown. The chapters themselves are divided up between the three women, but the first person narration does not always match up with the prime protagonist in the chapter; sometimes the first person narration switches to someone else in that woman's life. In Virginia's chapters, however, the first person never switches to anyone else: we don't hear Vanessa's thoughts, and we don't hear Leonard's or Nelly's thoughts. The same is true of the Laura Brown chapters; we know her son's reactions only through her eyes, and she retains the narrative throughout each one of the chapters which bears her name on the heading. In the Mrs. Dalloway chapters, the point of view feels like an omniscient narrator; the first person...