The preceding chapters have explored Woolf's emphasis throughout her writings on the notion that the individual's average everyday mode of Being-in-the-world comes to be defined and ‘held in place’ (‘Sketch’: 92) by the typically veiled forces, conventions and prescriptions of the social order, including the often overlapping discourses of patriarchy, religion, nationalism and history. As discussed, such an approach to the relationship between self and world may be contrasted with Heidegger's ontological emphasis in Being and Time. In this chapter, the focus shifts to the crucial role that moods and sensations play in Woolf's textual representations of the individual's experience of Being-in-the-world. This notion will be explored from the perspective of Heidegger's understanding that

As Heidegger's assertion reflects, moods provide the potential means by which each individual's relationship to the world comes to be disclosed. Thiele observes that, from a Heideggerian perspective, ‘Far from standing between us and our world, moods are what first and foremost bring us into the world, into our “there”’ (1997: 497). In Being and Time, Heidegger emphasises that ‘we are never free of moods’ (BT: 175); as such, the individual always already finds him or herself in one mood or another. Such an understanding of moods as the inevitable, inescapable and ever-changing conduit through which the individual's relationship to the world is situated and revealed is also reflected throughout Woolf's writings.