Virginia Woolf’s concept of characterization was quite different than that of
popular novelists. In fact many critics of her time were of the view that Woolf fails to create a memorable portrayal of her characters. However, Woolf delineates her concept of characterization in her essays “Modern Fiction” and “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”. She was not inclined to create characters as was done by Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy who were "never interested in character in itself; or in the book itself. They were interested in something outside." For her, 'each person is a multiplicity of characters and identities'. And her portrayal of characters is but a ceaseless process of becoming, that is, the personality 'in its flowing through time'. In the process, the readers are presented with multiple views of her characters for building up a profile of a particular character's traits and life being. The psychology was the field of interest for all the Modern writers such as Joyce, Proust and Henry James. Following the psychological insights by Freud and Jung, the modern writer, came to view human personality from a new perspective under the pressure of developments in physical science, psychology, philosophy and other streams of knowledge. He consciously or unconsciously comes to debase the 'hero' to the 'antihero' of modern society bringing forth a reciprocating change in the pattern of fiction. Virginia Woolf stood up as a spokesperson for these modern writers. Indeed the conventional writers drew their characters minutely about how they dressed, what they ate, and various other things. The characters in the modern fiction like that of Virginia Woolf are differently poised from the angle of inner being. This kind of bold and dramatic experimentation now comes forward to penetrate into the thick curtain of the superficial self in order to present the nascent states of consciousness that permeates one other.