Read (Virginia Woolf) Like a Writer

Session 1 (Mrs. Dalloway): January 24 - February 14, 2024
Session 2 (To the Lighthouse): February 21 - March 13, 2024

4 Wednesdays per session, 5PM-6:30PM

Online via Zoom
$225 for 1 session
$395 for both sessions

The more we bring an analytic eye to others’ work, the more possibilities open up in our own. In this course, we’ll closely read two classic novels by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. 

SESSION 1: Set in London one ordinary Wednesday in mid-June shortly after the end of WWI, Mrs. Dalloway shows us a society trying to find its footing after a devastating war. The novel established a new mode of storytelling, named “stream of consciousness” at the time, and is recognized today as a masterful use of point of view and interiority. 

SESSION 2: To the Lighthouse’s three sections are set before, during, and after WWI and span one day, ten years, and one day, respectively. The novel extended and complicated Woolf’s mastery of her new stream of consciousness style and added an element of time dilation to her prose. 

We’ll read each book in four sessions over four weeks, for a total of eight weekly sessions, delving into various craft aspects, such as point of view, dialogue, setting, and characterization. Pencil in hand, we will take on key paragraphs, excavating practical techniques in the process. You'll leave with new tools for close-reading your own and others’ work. 

So that we’re on the same page, literally, we’ll read the same edition of each book. The book to be read are:

• Mrs. Dalloway, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Anne Fernald
• To the Lighthouse, unabridged version with a forward by Eudora Welty

Jennifer Carson is an author, literary critic, book group facilitator, physicist, and the founder of To the Lighthouse. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Science, Six Hens Journal and Barnes & Noble Review. She has just completed her first novel, The Savage Path, and is represented by Stephanie Cabot at Susanna Lea Associates.