“Mrs. McNab’s Time Passes: Working Women Outside the Brackets in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” /“O tempo da sra. McNab passa: Mulheres que trabalham fora do suporte em Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse”

This creative critical piece considers the changing economic status of women and related changes in prose forms between the 1920s and the 2020s. We explore the character of Mrs. McNab, a housekeeper, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), using sentences from the novel interspersed with creative-criticism in brackets (just as the action of the plot is bracketed in the novel). We argue that while upper class women are bracketed and domestic staff kept outside the brackets in Woolf’s novel, the daughters of educated men she identified with trouble the brackets today, while the Mrs. McNabs are still outside the brackets.  --- Original in English