As a modernist author, Virginia Woolf experimented with literary form, and her use of point-of-view was no exception. In “The New Dress,” Woolf uses a third-person point of view. This point of view can be described as limited since we have access to the thoughts of the main character (Mabel) but not the other characters in the story. 

Woolf’s use of point-of-view, however, is much more complicated than the labels of "third-person" and "limited" might suggest. Woolf was known for her use of free indirect discourse, a narrative style that—although rooted in the third person—provides the degree of unmediated access to a character’s thoughts that we tend to associate with a first-person point of view. Consider the following passage in which Mabel’s own thoughts are presented through the narrator:

“But instead of looking fierce or tragic as Rose Shaw would have done—Rose would have looked like Boadicea—she looked foolish and self-conscious and simpered like a school girl and slouched across the room.”

This description provides us with a sense of Mabel’s own thoughts, and it does so in a stylistically noteworthy way: Woolf’s use of the em-dash draws attention to Mabel’s own thoughts, but it does so without presenting them as her own.

Throughout the story, we have access to Mabel’s own thoughts as they jump from one concern to another. Mabel is highly conscious of her own thought patterns, as she moves from reflections on the English Empire to Shakespeare to the people around her:

“She meant, or she tried to make herself think that she meant, that it was the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned.”

We learn not only what Mabel thinks but about her thought process itself. As the story progresses, her thoughts become increasingly fragmented:

“She would go to the London Library to-morrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall, where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person.”

In these final moments of the story, we have access to Mabel’s stream of consciousness as she moves from highly detailed fantasy to fantasy; in these moments, time and space are replaced by Mabel’s unmediated thoughts.