Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is the fourth novel of Virginia Woolf and the one in which she found her mature method. It takes place on a single day — a Wednesday in mid-June 1923 — in London, and follows two people who never meet. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, walks through Westminster to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening, receives an unexpected visit from her old suitor Peter Walsh, back from India, and gives her party. Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran of the First World War suffering from shell shock, walks in Regent’s Park with his Italian wife Rezia, hallucinates, is visited by doctors who do not understand him, and throws himself from a window rather than be taken to an asylum. At the party, Clarissa hears of the suicide of a young man she has never met, and feels a strange kinship with him.

The novel is told not through plot but through the flow of consciousness, moving from mind to mind — Clarissa, Peter, Septimus, Rezia, Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth, her old friend Sally Seton, strangers in the street — linked by chance sights and the sound of Big Ben striking the hours, while memories of a summer at Bourton thirty years before flood into the present.

At a glance

Published	14 May 1925, by the Hogarth Press (London) and Harcourt Brace (New York)
Setting	Westminster, Bond Street, Regent’s Park and Harley Street, London, one day in June 1923
Working title	The Hours
Origins	Clarissa Dalloway first appears in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and in the story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”

The day

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” On a fresh June morning, Clarissa Dalloway sets out from her house in Westminster. The war is over; the morning is “fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” She remembers Bourton, the country house of her girlhood, and the summer she was eighteen, when Peter Walsh loved her and she refused to marry him, choosing instead the steady, kind, unimaginative Richard Dalloway. Big Ben strikes: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” She loves life, London, “this moment of June”. She feels very young and at the same time unspeakably aged; she has a perpetual sense “of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” At the florist, a car backfires; a great car with drawn blinds — perhaps the Queen’s, perhaps the Prime Minister’s — draws a crowd. An aeroplane writes letters in smoke over London, advertising toffee; everyone tries to read it.

Among the crowd is Septimus Warren Smith, about thirty, a clerk who volunteered for the war “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square”. He served with distinction, but when his officer and friend Evans was killed just before the Armistice, he felt nothing — and now he cannot feel. He hears birds singing in Greek, sees the dead Evans behind railings, believes trees are alive and that he has a message for humanity: “men must not cut down trees… universal love.” His young wife Lucrezia (Rezia), a milliner from Milan whom he married in Italy, lonely and frightened, tries to get him to look at things. He has threatened to kill himself.

Clarissa returns home to mend her green silk dress for the party and learns that Richard has been invited to lunch with the society hostess Lady Bruton, without her — a small wound. She goes up to her room, a narrow attic bed where she sleeps alone since her illness, and reflects on her lack of something central, a coldness, and on her love for Sally Seton, a wild, beautiful girl at Bourton who once kissed her on the terrace — “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”.

Suddenly Peter Walsh arrives, back from India after five years, to arrange a divorce for a married woman he is in love with. Old feelings surge; they talk; he bursts into tears; she kisses him; she thinks, “If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!” Her daughter Elizabeth comes in, and Peter leaves. Clarissa calls after him: “Remember my party to-night!”

Peter walks through London, thinking of Clarissa — her worldliness, her snobbery, her “coldness”, the “death of the soul” he accused her of at Bourton — and of his own failures. He falls asleep on a bench in Regent’s Park.

Septimus and Rezia sit in the same park, waiting for an appointment with the great Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw. Septimus’s earlier doctor, Dr Holmes, a hearty general practitioner, insists there is nothing wrong with him and he should take up a hobby. At noon (Big Ben striking) they see Sir William, who, with his doctrine of “Proportion” — and its sister, Conversion — diagnoses “a complete breakdown” and arranges for Septimus to be separated from his wife and sent to a rest home in the country. “Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art — a sense of proportion.” The narrator’s irony is savage: “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair.”

Richard Dalloway lunches with Lady Bruton, who wants help writing a letter to The Times about her scheme for emigration to Canada; afterwards he buys Clarissa roses, meaning to tell her he loves her, and does not manage to say it, but she understands. Clarissa reflects on the “privacy of the soul”: there is “a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf.” Elizabeth goes out with her history tutor, Miss Kilman, a poor, bitter, religious woman whom Clarissa hates and who hates Clarissa; Elizabeth escapes her and rides alone on a bus up the Strand, enjoying her freedom.

At six o’clock, in their lodgings, Septimus and Rezia have a moment of happiness as she makes a hat and he helps her, laughing — the first time he has been himself. Then Dr Holmes arrives to take him away. Septimus, hearing him on the stairs, looks round for a means of escape — the bread knife, the gas — and jumps from the window onto the railings below: “Holmes was at the door. ‘I’ll give it you!’ he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.” Peter Walsh, walking past, hears the ambulance bell and thinks it “one of the triumphs of civilisation”.

In the evening, the party. Clarissa stands at the top of the stairs, greeting her guests: the Prime Minister comes, to everyone’s delight; Lady Bruton; old Aunt Helena; Peter; and Sally Seton, now Lady Rosseter, wife of a rich Manchester manufacturer, with five sons. Clarissa fears the party is a failure, then feels its success. The Bradshaws arrive late, and Lady Bradshaw explains in an undertone that a young man, one of Sir William’s patients, has killed himself. “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.”

She goes alone into a little room. She imagines his death — “He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes” — and understands him: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate… There was an embrace in death.” She thinks that he had kept his treasure, while she had lost hers in “corruption, lies, chatter”. She sees that Sir William was “capable of some indescribable outrage — forcing your soul”. In the house opposite, an old woman goes to bed. Clarissa feels “somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” Then she returns to her party.

Peter and Sally sit together, talking about the past, waiting for Clarissa. The novel ends:

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Themes

Time and the passing moment. Big Ben and other clocks strike throughout the day, “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing”, the public time of empire and appointments; against it flows the inner time of memory, in which thirty years ago is as vivid as now. The novel is about living in the moment — Clarissa’s love of “life; London; this moment of June” — and about the burden of the past.

Death and the will to live. Clarissa and Septimus are doubles: both sensitive, both fear life and death, both feel the terror and ecstasy of existence. Woolf wrote in her introduction to the 1928 Modern Library edition that in the first version “Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party.” Septimus dies that Clarissa might live; his death becomes, for her, a kind of communication.

The war. Five years after the Armistice, the war haunts London: in Septimus’s shell shock, in grieving mothers, in the official optimism that will not look at its damage. Woolf’s treatment of shell shock — and her hatred of doctors who coerce and “force your soul”, drawn from her own experience of psychiatric treatment — is among the earliest and most powerful in literature.

Society and the self. The novel satirises the English ruling class — the Prime Minister, Lady Bruton, Sir William Bradshaw, Hugh Whitbread — and yet treats Clarissa’s party as a genuine creative act, “an offering; to combine, to create”. It asks how we can know each other, given “the privacy of the soul”.

Sexuality. Clarissa’s love for Sally Seton, her “moment” on the terrace, and Septimus’s love for Evans suggest desires that the society around them cannot acknowledge.

Technique

Woolf called her method “tunnelling”: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” The narrator moves fluidly between minds by free indirect discourse, using the sky-writing aeroplane, the car, Big Ben, an old woman singing, or a passer-by to pass from one consciousness to another.

Afterlife

Mrs Dalloway has been filmed (1997, with Vanessa Redgrave). Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998) — Woolf’s working title — interweaves a day in the life of Woolf writing the novel (1923), a 1950s housewife reading it, and a modern Clarissa Vaughan planning a party for a friend dying of AIDS; Stephen Daldry’s film (2002) won Nicole Kidman an Oscar.

In conversation

• “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” — one of the most famous opening lines in modern fiction.
• A sense of proportion — Sir William’s doctrine, for any conformist tyranny dressed as good sense.
• “For there she was” — the sudden fullness of a person’s presence.