As emphasised in the previous chapter, it is the average everyday lived experience of Being-in-the-world that is a central concern and preoccupation throughout Woolf's writings. Despite the incalculable variety of everyday experiences that any individual may encounter during his or her lifetime, each is always and inevitably located in a particular place, whether it be the home, the street, a city, the countryside, the workplace or an armchair. Place provides the setting and context for all experience. The inherent connection between the individual, experience and place, and how each depends upon the other for definition and actuality, is a view that is repeatedly reinforced throughout Woolf's oeuvre. Woolf's representations of place demonstrate her understanding that such locations provide the individual with the potential means to carry out his or her intentions, form and gather memories, and feel safe and welcome; alternatively, and even simultaneously, Woolf's writings signify place as the site of threat, unease, and thwarted hopes and desires. Place facilitates our connections with the Other and sense of inclusion, as well as our moments of solitude, isolation and exclusion. From conception to death, place is a primordial and integral element of what it means to be human. Emphasised and demonstrated throughout this chapter is the understanding that, for Woolf, place provides a tangible representation of the hierarchies and ideologies that underlie the formations of English society in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.

From the outset of this chapter, it must be acknowledged that the issues of place and spatiality within Being and Time have been largely overlooked or strongly criticised by critics, due mainly to Heidegger's preoccupation with the issues of time and temporality; indeed, as Heidegger emphasises: ‘The temporality of Being-in-the-world’ is ‘the foundation for that spatiality which is specific for Dasein’ (BT: 384). Despite such assertions, as his later work testifies, the notion that space and place are derived from time is a view that Heidegger himself comes to abandon. Works such as Jeff Malpas's monograph, Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (2008), and Edward Casey's The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997) reflect a turn towards Heidegger's Being and Time as a significant contribution to understandings of place.