ABSTRACT
Mrs. Woolf was always aware of the gap between her intention and her achievement, and always bent upon further experiment. Mrs. Woolf, in the words of Bernard Blackstone, "explored the world of the mind-especially the feminine mind-under precise conditions of character and environment". Mr. Ramsay is at times enraged by the folly of women's minds. The "modern mind"—the mind seeking literary expression—finds the old tools, lyric poetry and poetic drama, inadequate to deal with the world of the 1920's. Characteristic of the modern mind is the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated; "feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold.
