Death and contentment in Virginia Woolf’s war novels

One of the most striking characteristics of Virginia Woolf′s war novels – Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) – is the confrontation of death and mortality in the fabric of everyday life (and of the narrative). Death and destruction – set forth historically by World War I – lurk in the background, but Woolf expands her fiction into a reflection on what it means to be mortal whose depth and beauty rival with Shakespeare and Montaigne. The thrust of these novels is to show the ways by which a mortal existence can be enough and this is a brief study of how Virginia Woolf manages to pull this off.