Hi. The following text is from the story "The New Dress" by Virginia Woolf. In the second paragraph she suddenly starts to say "She would...". Does it mean " She thinks to herself that she will probably do these things tomorrow"?
Text:
Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert—they were all the same poor water–veined creatures who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. That wretched fly—where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer?—struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That made her feel ashamed of herself!
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, by 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. She would be absolutely transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be called Sister Somebody; she would never give a thought to clothes again. And for ever after she would be perfectly clear about Charles Burt and Miss Milan and this room and that room; and it would be always, day after day, as if she were lying in the sun or carving the mutton. It would be it!
So she got up from the blue sofa, and the yellow button in the looking–glass got up too, and she waved her hand to Charles and Rose to show them she did not depend on them one scrap, and the yellow button moved out of the looking–glass, and all the spears were gathered into her breast as she walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said “Good night.”
cattttShe would go to the London Library ...
Substitute 'was going to' or 'intended to' for 'would' throughout this passage, and you've got the same idea.
CJ
No, it means that she was determined to do those things.