The Light in a Sketch from the Past and Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf's method of writing fiction was always to "dig beautiful caves" behind, in and around to her characters - dig into their conscience to tell their story with the same skill with which one tells one's own. It is his process of "tunneling" that makes his style so distinctive: his sentences layered with multiple meanings, his paragraphs full of stream-of-consciousness internal monologues, and his sparse dialogue. Clearly, he had few qualms about taking the modern novel's all-too-common linear narrative form and turning it on its head to dig down to its core - its very essence - and fill it with his art. The resulting caves are denser, more detailed, and, as a result, often darker than the literary creations of other women writers of her time. To achieve them, Woolf manipulates both the direction and span of time, includes literary allusions, and crafts her sentences to better develop her characters' relationships with her themes and with each other. In A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf describes the circumstances under which memories manifest: "the past," she says, "returns when the present flows so smoothly that it is like the flow of a deep river." This vision of time – of the reemergence of the past during controlled moments of the present – ​​resonates throughout the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Woolf's characters. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf manipulates time to show her characters' relationships with each other and how their pasts govern their current lifestyles. Indeed, the central plot lines of the novel: preparations for Clarissa Dalloway's party, Septimus Smi..... . middle of paper...ruth" that he so often sought in the works of other authors2 - which enlighten his readers to the end of the dense and tortuous tunnels of his novel. Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1989. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Woolf, Virginia Schulkind. 2nd ed.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Mrs. Dalloway : Harcourt, Inc, 1925. Note1, "Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis." Society, Catharine R. Stimpson, ed., (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), xvi.2. A Room of One's Own, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981)