In the twentieth century, thanks to new scientific, philosophical and psychological theories, writers change their idea on time.

Virginia Woolf, influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson with his theory on inner time, starts to elaborate her personal sense of time, which is extremely distant from the traditional chronological sequence. She introduces a personal and subjective time in her novels and states that time is a personal process of the individual’s mind. Time exists only in the individual’s mind and constantly flows in uninterrupted successions.

A work in which we found this particular use of time is “Mrs Dalloway”. It is set in London, on a mid-June day in 1923 and develops in a period of 12 hours. The story opens at 10 o’clock, with Clarissa Dalloway, who goes out to buy some flowers for an evening party she is giving and ends with the party itself.

There isn’t a real plot, it is simply a mosaic of inner thoughts and reminiscences, considerations on past and present events. The novel is not divided in chapters, only, sometimes, there are spaces to divide different mental moments. She didn’t divide the novel into chapters because this would mean breaking the continuity of time; the mental process has no division, our thoughts flow constantly without interruptions.

The novel is characterized by an innovative use of fictional time which is divided in:

• time of external events, measured by the striking of the hours of the Big Ben (the London’s giant clock tower) through the entire novel. Indeed, the original title of the novel was “The Hours”.
• time of internal events (flow of thoughts), which is dilated, covering past, present, future.

Each character is not introduced and revealed by his or her external appearance, but through his or her inner life; the narration goes from one point of view to another, from present to past. Each character may assume different aspects, depending if they are seen from outside (from other characters’ point of view) or from inside.

Other important themes of Virginia Woolf are men’s consciousness, memories and interior thoughts. She tries to explore the human mind.  In this exploration she realizes that some moments in people’s life are so powerful and memorable - even if the events themselves are unimportant - that they can be vividly recalled while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: moments of being and non-being.

A moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience, instead a moment of non-being is when the individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if asleep.

In her novels she wants to express human thoughts and to do that she often uses new experimental techniques, like the stream of consciousness, a method to represent the thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind as a flow.