Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Virginia Woolf's fourth novel (1925) can be regarded as her first real approach to maturity, since she experiments with time and mingles present experience and past memories in an artistic way. Apart from the formal innovations, Woolf does not avoid the thematic challenge either: "I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense", she notes in her diary.
Mrs. Dalloway is set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, and we follow Clarissa Dalloway, the elegant wife of a Member of Parliament and perfect London hostess, through the course of this day which is going to culminate in the party she is going to give in the evening.
But there is much more to the novel than the superficial level of social activities: interwoven with the public world of post-war Britain is the female protagonist's inner life and her ambivalence about her other self - she wishes both to escape the social life and to enter it more fully; she feels both sheltered and anonymous, useful and trivial, committed and deluded.
Clarissa is looking for meaning in her life, primarily in her past, and we learn, among many other things, that she has chosen the safety of marriage to the rather ponderous Richard as opposed to the unpredictability of a life with Peter Walsh or the scandal of a relationship with a woman in order to preserve her own private self.
Virginia Woolf is interested in human personality and convicted of the right of the individual to possess and to cultivate their identity.... Clarissa is thrown into a field of polar tensions in which on the one hand she strives for individuality and tries to distance herself from her environment; but in which on the other hand she also feels that she has to step out of her seclusion in order to take part in society.
And she proves herself capable of asserting herself in the life of society with courage and instinct. She is permanently ready to serve, to help and to support, seeing her role in society in terms of a personal task: through her parties she attempts to save people from their solitude, to establish relationships between them and make them feel the beauties of life.
Virginia Woolf has a gift to see behind people's social masks and to reveal in a very beautiful way how people live, how they love and hate, fear and long, and cope with the pleasures as well as the difficulties of everyday existence. Read more ›

'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day', suggests Virginia Woolf in "The Common Reader", 'The mind receives a myriad impressions....is it not the task of the novelist to convey this?' In "Mrs Dalloway" the cause-and-effect narrative of the realist tradition is abandoned. The 'scaffolding' of the realist plot is taken down; there is 'scarcely a brick to be seen' in this critique of social convention. Instead, Woolf's reader follows an apparently random chain of external happening and thought-processes that comprise a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway.

Consider the two-page section in which Mrs Dalloway has left her long-anticipated party in search of privacy. Woolf's use of free indirect interior monologue grants the reader access to the protagonist's mind as the principal chain-of-events is halted, the narrative infused with a sort of psychoanalytical free-association, as memories of Boughton and the past merge into London and the present: 'It held...something of her own in it...this sky above Westminster'. Woolf's prose concentrates on minor events and descriptive details that are insignificant in the context of linear progression, unable to be twisted into the 'realist' tradition of a causal plot. Look at how Mrs Dalloway's thought-process is snapped by a sudden interjection ('Oh, but how surprising!...') as the old lady in the house opposite glances across. The emotional flux of Woolf's narrative refocuses Mrs Dalloway's outlook as the old lady's quiet independence is contrasted with the pseudo-vitality of the party. Moreover, the motif of the striking clock is placed in immediate juxtaposition, representing not only the passing of the years for Mrs Dalloway but contributing to the unity of the novel. The sound of the clock striking evokes an earlier narrative event as Mrs Dalloway recalls the suicide of Septimus and strives to connect her own experience with that of others: 'The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two three, she did not pity him with all this going on'.

Woolf, like many of her contemporaries, employs self-conscious literary allusion as a means of unifying a text. For the schizophrenic Septimus, incessant mental echoes of a refrain from Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" ('Fear no more the heat of the sun') had indicated a terror of life and the ultimate social defiance of his death. The same refrain drifts across Mrs Dalloway's mind as, having defied the social whirl of the party, she recognizes in this 'moment of being' her parallel with the insane youth she never met: 'But what an extraordinary night! She felt glad that he had done it'. However, Mrs Dalloway's sense of exaltation is paralleled by recognition of her essential difference to the schizophrenic, her capacity for life, her ability to transcend social convention, and to survive 'the heat of the sun'. 'The clock was striking': the image recalls the power of chronology that continues to dominate the tradition of the realist novel. Nevertheless, the dissolution of its 'leaden circles' emphasizes Woolf' s concern with time as much more than a linear structure, as an inter-weaving of past and present containing a multiplicity of potential futures. Whereas Septimus's mind fell apart, Mrs Dalloway 'must assemble' and become 'Clarissa', become herself, a point of being.

This is a beautiful novel, scripted out of what its author called 'incantation and mystery', in which a social message is communicated via rhythmic repetition, metaphor, 'moments of being'.

Readers seeking to deepen their understanding of Virginia Woolf, her novels, and wider literary world would do well to invest in Hermione Lee's superb critical biography. Read more ›