"Mrs. Brown's" Journey: An Imagined Correspondence Between Virginai Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre
Graduation Date
Spring 2003
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program Name
Humanities
First Reader
Jan Van Stavern, PhD
Second Reader
Patricia Dougherty, OP, PhD
Abstract
“Mrs. Brown” is a fictional character referred to by Virginia Woolf in her essay titled. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" in which Woolf discusses how to create characters in fiction, and explores the differences between earlier writers and her contemporaries the “moderns” in writing fiction. This project explores the idea that Woolf’s experimental stream of consciousness writing style anticipates themes of Existentialism, the twentieth- century philosophical interpretation of existence based on existence preceding essence, in other words, individual responsibility in an unknowable universe. It is organized in an imagined correspondence between Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the leading Existential philosophers and writers. Sartre introduces Simone de Beauvoir into the correspondence and Beauvoir and Woolf also exchange letters about a proposed biography of the fifteenth-century author and women s rights advocate, Christine de Pizan.