In returning to my own early piece on eighteenth-century writers and women's dreams in their fiction, I cast a backward glance over my own twentieth century (with a slice of the twenty-first), pausing to consider various female writers who chose to deal with dreams, especially those of women. The greatest artist in this line is Virginia Woolf. In The Voyage Out (1915), Woolf 's dreaming woman is her heroine, Rachel Vinrace. We come to know her well, following her experience through some three hundred pages before she falls into the fits of dreaming which signal her illness and her end. At the outset the experience is more like a vexation, an effort to recall:

After a while, Milton's words become image and then reality: ‘The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed’ (Woolf 1992, 311). Images become less pleasant, the watery associations less refreshing, as Rachel's delirium takes over:

As Rachel's illness advances, her dreams become more effective and horrifying; these descriptions supply the last occasions on which we participate in a consciousness long familiar to us. Dream and death are often associated in literary works. Delirium not infrequently ties the two together. Virginia Woolf may have been affected by Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), in which Marianne Dashwood in her illness falls into delirium (Volume III, chapter 7). Austen gives us no scenery for Marianne's dreams then; the scenery featured earlier in the romantic rainy walk in which Marianne indulged her lost love and brought on the menacing illness.