Virginia Woolf: rooms, relationships, and writing

In this thesis, I explore the effect of the different domestic interiors inhabited by Virginia Woolf during her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood on her personal relationships, on her life as a professional writer, and on her work. I analyze how, in her life and novels, women’s lives, work, privacy, and family relationships were negotiated within these domestic spaces and how the interactions between these interiors and her relationships and their constraints and freedoms contributed to her writing. I provide examples of rooms, domestic arrangements and objects from her novels that parallel those of her childhood such as the tea table, looking-glass, drawing room, bedroom, and study, which are used, in part, to portray the inequalities and limitations placed upon women in a patriarchal society. And, I show how, in turn, Woolf’s writing and modernist techniques were a means of making sense of her own interior spaces and relationships.