EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE FORMS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S SHORT FICTION

Virginia Woolf has emerged as one of the greatest innovative writers for her pioneering efforts to produce a new type of novel making, a clear deviation from the established trend. She develops innovative literary technique in order to reveal women’s experience and find an alternative to the dominating views of reality. She took women representation and women as author of representation and argued that a change in the form of literature was necessary because most literature had been written by men out of their own need for their own uses. She seeks to make literature less of an art form to be understood chronologically and more of work to be experienced simultaneously. She stresses the inclusion of every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain and spirit with a mode of writing unconstrained by syntax and linearity. In doing so she opens up the rigid rules of the traditional narrative to a fluidness that operates outside the subject – other narrative relationship. Virginia Woolf throughout her career has written novels like Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, A Room Of One’s Own, The Waves, The Years, To the Light House, Day and Night etc. and regarded in the literary world as a famous novelist of twentieth century modernist novel. Though she is less known as a short story writer still her collected forty six short fictions display her mastery over short fiction writing. As because her stories are not in the traditional form they are called as ‘fiction’ and ‘sketches’ by Susan Dick. She has told in A Room of One’s Own that as women do not have time and so many works to do, they write fiction in shorter and concentrated form. It also requires less effort and time to write than the novel. In that novel she has told that to become a writer a woman needs a room of her own, time and financial freedom. To some extend she enjoys all the privileges. She came in contact with the Bloomsbury Groups where she found the scope of writing, marries Leonard Woolf, a member of Bloomsbury Group and owner of Hogarth Press where she gets the freedom to publish her work without the interruption of anyone. As a result of this she starts writing short stories in a different form and explores various aspects of human life and their experiences.