Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The sacred space of the soul

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Woolf’s depiction of the individual soul in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and its indebtedness to her reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), particularly to his concept of sobornost’, or holy connectedness. Woolf’s vision of the soul corresponds to Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox representation of the soul: She points to an expression of spiritual value through both an individual impenetrable consciousness, what Woolf terms the “privacy of the soul”; and, most importantly, through a mysterious connectedness between Clarissa and Septimus.