From Traditional Narratives to Literary Innovation: A Quantitative Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Stylistic Evolution

Abstract Virginia Woolf, one of the most renowned modernist British writers, left an enduring imprint on the literary landscape with her distinct and influential writing style. Her literary journey is characterized by an evolution, transitioning from conformity with Victorian and Edwardian literary conventions to pioneering a groundbreaking and experimental approach, notably employing the innovative technique of stream of consciousness. This investigation seeks to identify and quantify this transformation. To achieve this goal, I curated two distinct corpora representing Woolf’s early and later works and meticulously processed them using the multi-dimensional analysis tagger. Subsequently, a battery of independent samples was conducted to compare six distinct dimensions and then 67 linguistic features between the two corpora. This study uncovers a discernible evolution in Woolf’s writing style, with her later works displaying a lessened degree of persuasiveness, abstraction, and online communicativeness, and an enhanced degree of personal involvement and subjectivity. Our findings not only enrich our comprehension of Woolf’s literary development and accomplishments but also shed light on the broader context of the modernist movement and its profound influence on the modernist literary style.