![]() “Her own experiences of excitement and depression are woven into the book, giving authenticity particularly to the portrayal of the ex-soldier and his states of mind.” (Jean Thomson, 2004) The condition of Septimus on that day of June 1923, which will lead him to kill himself in the evening, is presented in the text as the result of a journey that began some time before, during the Great War. In the development of the Septimus character, Woolf drew on him, her own personal experience: the realism of this character, his almost tangible madness, is not the result of a fine narrative mimicry but a profound process of reminiscence and analysis of a disease that cyclically overwhelmed the life of the author. Woolf herself, in the introduction to the novel written in 1928, was explicit in saying that Septimus was to be interpreted as Clarissa’s double. ![]() ![]() Woolf’s mental health influenced, at least from a structural point of view, the the novel’s ‘bipolar’ structure, which sees, in fact, the intertwining sensations, memories, points of view, perceptions and desperations of two characters, in particular, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, his double and opposite ideal. Dalloway, published in 1925, is the one that deals with the theme of mental illness in the most direct and effective way. ![]() Among the whole production of the beloved English writer, the novel Mrs. ![]()
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