Mrs. Dalloway: How Much Is Autobiographical?

Did Virginia Woolf realize how much she was writing about herself throughout her career? It is almost impossible to say for certain. As readers, all we can do is sift through the pieces and conjecture. In Mrs. Dalloway, said by some critics to be her best work, the central characters show a remarkable resemblance to Woolf at times. Woolf uses the characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in a large way to describe the two sides of herself…the rational and the sane. While it might be too hasty to say that she intended these two characters to directly reflect her own personality it its different shades, we can certainly see where this happens, even if unintentionally.
Clarissa Dalloway is a pathetic and tragic figure. Pathetic because she distills the joy of life into simple social functions, and tragic because although she has explicit knowledge of the joy of living, social functions are the only method available to her with which to personalize this joy...