Mrs Dalloway

By Virginia Woolf and Merry M. Pawlowski

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield.

Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence.

Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848704718

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King’s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father’s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London’s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf’s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.

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Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

with an introduction and notes

by Merry M. Pawlowski

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

This edition of Mrs Dalloway first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2003

Introduction and Notes © Merry M. Pawlowski 2003

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 471 8

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Contents

General Introduction

Introduction

Notes to Introduction

Bibliography

Mrs Dalloway

Notes to Mrs Dalloway

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

Mrs Dalloway and the Feminist Revision of Male Modernism

[T]he mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality’, not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say’, but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

[T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, pp. 53–4]

In the summer of 1922, Virginia Woolf’s mind was a catalyst, illuminated at the beginning and the end of that summer by two forces: hearing Eliot read aloud The Waste Land and reluctantly reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Echoes of both are heard throughout Mrs Dalloway, submerged, transformed and forged by Woolf into a new combination, a feminine quest to buy flowers and give a party in a social waste land shaken to its core in the aftermath of world war.

On 23 June 1922, Woolf wrote in her diary:

Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure . . . One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called . . . Tom’s autobiography – a melancholy one.

[Diary, Vol. 2, p. 178]

On the same date, Woolf reflected on her own work, writing about her anxiety over audience response, ‘If they say this is all a clever experiment, I shall produce Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street as the finished product.’ The story Woolf alludes to serves as precursor, an early version of the novel, and Eliot’s poem surfaces later throughout in the rhythm and language of Mrs Dalloway, as Woolf’s response to Ulysses shapes the revisionist direction of her plot.

By August 1922, Woolf was reading Ulysses,

I should be reading Ulysses, & fabricating my case for & against. I have read 200 pages so far – not a third; & have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters – to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace!

[Diary, Vol. 2, pp. 188–9]

Again, on the same date, Woolf was ‘laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway & bringing up light buckets’. ‘[G]reat Tom’ is, of course, T. S. Eliot, who thought Ulysses a masterpiece of modernist expression, and ‘Mrs Dalloway’ referred to here is not yet the novel but still the story which would provide Woolf with the idea for the novel. As the record of Woolf’s diary indicates, then, at its inception, Mrs Dalloway not only shared but also reinterpreted the modernist preoccupation with Odyssean narrative and Waste Land myths. [1]

Out of the Chrysalis

Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here or there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences. [2]

The work of Joyce and Eliot had time to mingle in Woolf’s creative imagination with her own memories and earliest experiences until 14 October 1922, when she noted in her diary the impulse for a new novel. ‘Mrs Dalloway,’ she wrote, ‘has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side – something like that. Septimus Smith? – is that a good name?’ (Diary, Vol. 2, p. 207). Only ten days before the appearance of Septimus Smith’s name in her diary, Woolf had finished ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, where no such character appears. [3] But the evidence of her holograph notes for her third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), indicates that Septimus had taken shape in her imagination as part of a manuscript story entitled ‘The Prime Minister’, from which Woolf would draw heavily for the opening scenes of Mrs Dalloway. In the story, Septimus suffers from delusional paranoia, thinking that he is the messiah sent to assassinate the prime minister. [4] This story, along with ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, provided Woolf with the material to begin the novel. As ‘The Prime Minister’ folded into the beginning of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf had begun to reconceive Septimus to serve as foil and double to Clarissa. What may have been in Woolf’s mind at the initial impulse to reinterpret him becomes more clear in Woolf’s explanations of the novel long after its publication. It appears, though, that even at this early stage, Clarissa Dalloway reappears in the longer work as part of Woolf’s effort to reconceive her in her own image, while Septimus accepts the death for which Clarissa had been destined. Woolf is able to distance herself through Clarissa from Septimus while at the same time drawing him closer through his name (Septimus means seventh, and Woolf was the seventh of the combined Stephen/Duckworth children) and through his insanity.

Clarissa, though, had lived in Woolf’s imagination for a long time before Septimus entered the scene or Joyce and Eliot fired her imagination into revisionist flames. Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), introduced Clarissa Dalloway to the reading public as a flighty London socialite married to former MP Richard Dalloway and travelling, or skimming, rather, along the surface of life. It is quite likely that the character had suggested herself to Woolf in the person of Kitty Maxse, née Lushington, a friend of Woolf’s mother and oldest sister, Stella. As girls, Virginia and her older sister Vanessa increasingly saw Kitty as a figure of fun and nicknamed her ‘Gushington’. [5] We meet the Dalloways only briefly, as they board the Euphrosyne, having bullied their way on board by using their influence and connections. They’ve been abroad, ‘broadening Mr Dalloway’s mind’, as he has little else to do, having been voted out of Parliament ‘by one of the accidents of political life’ (The Voyage Out, p. 39). Both Dalloways display their ignorance and supeficiality and are sharply satirised by Woolf when, for example, Richard opines, ‘ . . . may I be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in England! ’ (The Voyage Out, p. 43); and Clarissa emotes: ‘ "Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid – what it means to be English. One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages – and of men like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English!" ’ (The Voyage Out, p. 51).

Yet by 1922, the character of Clarissa Dalloway had undergone a transformation. Despite her feeling that she might be writing ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ too quickly and insubstantially, the story gives Woolf the opportunity to begin working out her own narrative method, weaving in and out of the mind and emotions, perhaps partly (and unwillingly) influenced by Joyce’s experimentation with stream-of-consciousness narration.

‘Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street’ launches Clarissa on the streets of London – this time to buy gloves rather than flowers – and to drink in the beauty of a June morning in town. Woolf has already found the defining image for the strokes of Big Ben, ‘leaden circles dissolved in the air’, and brings Clarissa into the same intersections with characters – Scrope Purvis, Hugh Whitbread – in the early pages of the story which reoccur later in the novel. Bourton and Clarissa’s girlhood do not appear, but two allusions to an ageing woman’s body do – a vague hint about menopause in Clarissa’s reflections about Hugh’s wife’s illness; and, later in the story, a reference to the agony of standing at the onset of a menstrual period. From the shallow Clarissa of The Voyage Out, who makes inaccurate literary attributions, this ageing Clarissa asserts powerful literary echoes in the stream of her thoughts. ‘And now can never mourn’, punctuates a remembrance of unspoken sorrow, and ‘ From the contagion of the world’s slow stain ’ [6] parallels her reflections on atheism. The story ends with an explosion outside in the streets while, inside the glove shop, Clarissa, hearing echoes of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in her mind, finally remembers the name of the other woman customer whom she has vainly tried to recall since she first entered the shop. This story is, in fact, one in a sequence of seven sketches edited by Stella McNichol and published under the title Mrs Dalloway’s Party. [7] Woolf seems to have intended the story, which bears the closest resemblance to the early pages of the finished novel, to be a first chapter.

By early November 1922, Woolf had begun to sketch out the novel, thinking about the ‘aeroplane chapter’ as a release from writing criticism; and by June of 1923, she had named the book The Hours (‘if thats its name?’ [Diary, Vol. 2, p. 248]). Sanity and insanity, life and death, and criticism of the social system were the keynote issues Woolf wanted to embed in this work; yet, filled with insecurities as she wrote in her diary on 19 June 1923, Woolf asked herself, ‘ . . . do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? . . . Am I writing The Hours from deep emotion? . . . Have I the power of conveying the true reality? . . . I foresee, to return to The Hours,’ she writes as she concludes her self-examination, ‘that this is going to be the devil of a struggle’ (Diary, Vol. 2, pp. 248–9).

The new, though provisional title, now suggests an ingredient has been added to Woolf’s creative cauldron. Much as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom plots a course through Dublin in a roughly twenty-four-hour period, Clarissa Dalloway’s movements through London intertwine with the wanderings of other characters, and are pinned to the chiming of the hours – Big Ben, St Margaret’s – ‘the leaden circles dissolving into air’.

The ‘struggle’ continues, but by August 1923 Woolf has made a discovery: ‘ . . . 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, & each comes to daylight at the present moment . . . ’ (Diary, Vol. 2, p. 263). Slightly more than two months later, Woolf is ‘in the thick of the mad scene in Regents Park’, and confides to herself: ‘It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far . . . ’ (Diary, Vol. 2, p. 272). By August of 1924, the book has become, simply, ‘Mrs Dalloway’; and, in October, a little more than a year after her discovery of a method, Woolf notes the novel’s completion.

An Invitation to Clarissa’s Party

‘Peter! Peter!’ cried Clarissa, following him out on the landing. ‘My party! Remember my party tonight!’ [p. 35]

The world of the novel is split, as Avrom Fleishman suggests, into a ‘dialectic of communion and individuation’ (Fleishman, p. 81); the individual, that is, and the community share the stage. Woolf herself alludes to this splitting of the novel by characterising her newly found method of tunnelling caves behind each character which ultimately connect in the present moment; and that moment is, of course, the day of Clarissa’s party. If Woolf is to effect a criticism of the social system while she examines the nature of individual consciousness (and unconsciousness), a woman’s party, and the preparations which go into it, provide the perfect vehicle for her purpose. ‘Clarissa Dalloway,’ Ellen Rosenman writes, ‘brings together disparate strands of life and fashions them into the harmonious whole of the party’ (Rosenman, p. 75), thus succeeding in reinterpreting the lack of importance given by society to women’s roles therein. We’re invited, then, not only to come to Clarissa’s party, but to share with Clarissa the preparations for her party, and to enter the hearts and minds of other characters in her sphere as well as those of her suicidal double, Septimus Smith, on a marvellous June day in London in 1923.

Septimus Warren Smith: The Uninvited Guest

Of Mrs Dalloway then one can only bring to light at the moment a few scraps, of little importance or none perhaps; as that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, has no existence; and that Mrs Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party. Such scraps are offered humbly to the reader in the hope that like other odds and ends they may come in useful. [8]

As Woolf looked back on her work in Mrs Dalloway for her introduction to the Modern Library edition, she acknowledged the fact that Septimus had indeed been intended as Clarissa’s double; in fact, he would die in Clarissa’s place. Yet as important as that psychological connection might be, Septimus Smith would never have been invited to Clarissa Dalloway’s party. Such social status makes him an important vehicle for her critique of the social system while, at the same time, allowing Woolf to explore the interiority of madness.

Clarissa, though, is the novel’s centre, with Septimus as her pale, and dying, shadow; and, as Abel observes, the potentially tragic plot of the soldier returned from war is sublimated and demoted to a tragic subplot (Abel, 1988, p. 107). With Clarissa foregrounded, Woolf is free to transfer the death she had planned for her to Septimus, thereby sacrificing male for female development. Furthermore, Woolf was able to distance, transfer and objectify her own memories of madness, especially during 1912 and 1913, and give them artistic expression through developing Septimus’s mad discourse (Wang, p. 188).

While it is a critical commonplace that Septimus stands in for Woolf’s own bouts with mental illness, the speculation about diagnoses differs widely. Septimus has been called schizophrenic, manic depressive and a survivor of trauma; [9] but regardless of the diagnosis, his illness afforded Woolf the opportunity for an exploration of madness and an attack on a medical community ill equipped to heal him.

Woolf’s choice of the year, 1923, clearly suggests that, for Septimus, the trauma suffered as a result of warfare is just now – after five years – reaching a head. Septimus’s case highlights the fashion in which society expected the war veteran to return to normalcy immediately, showing little patience with and even marginalising those who could not instantly conform. But even more importantly, Septimus’s case allows Woolf to launch a sustained attack on the medical community of her time. Septimus is treated by his doctors like a child, or, more to the point, like a girl; for his grief and his trauma have been so ‘feminised’ by the medical community that he is left with no ‘masculine’ means of expressing his sorrow. Woolf directs her satire toward the figures of two doctors, Holmes and Bradshaw. Bradshaw invites the bulk of her satire as his lack of empathy for his patients is stripped away by Woolf’s characterisation:

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess . . . Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion . . . [p. 73]

Bradshaw’s cure is the rest cure, one for which Woolf had particular antipathy – if only such patients would stay in bed, eat, and drink milk, the medical wisdom dictated, they would regain their sense of proportion and be converted to conformity. ‘But Proportion,’ Woolf writes:

. . . has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged – in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own – is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. [p. 74]

Woolf’s attack on Bradshaw and his ilk continues for another page, an attack that, had she sustained it any longer, would have threatened the very fabric of the narrative. As it is, Woolf bares her teeth as never before.

In her notes for the novel, Woolf wrote of Septimus, ‘He must somehow see through human nature – see its hypocrisy, & insincerity, its power to recover from every wound, incapable of taking any final impression. His sense that this is not worth having.’ [10] What Woolf suggests, as Wang describes, is a psychic subterranean, in the form of madness, rising up in resistance to the stranglehold of the state (Wang, p. 179). It is, perhaps, Septimus’s very ability to see to the core, together with the trauma of shell-shock, which has tipped him over the edge, allowing Woolf entry to a psyche out of touch with reality. The word ‘time’, for example, spoken by his wife in the park and indicating the time of their appointment with Bradshaw, sends Septimus into a visionary experience which ends in an encounter with his friend Evans, killed in the war:

‘It is time,’ said Rezia.

The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself –

‘For God’s sake don’t come!’ Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead. [p. 52]

Septimus, though insane, has seen the truth as the horror. [11]

Echoes of Eliot’s The Waste Land are woven throughout the rhythmic interior discourse of Septimus’s madness, and later, through Clarissa’s thoughts as she lives through Septimus’s death, [12] suggesting that they are linked in a way very like that which Yeats raises to a philosophical principle of opposition in A Vision: ‘Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.’ [13] Woolf supports this notion of interdependency by writing to Gerald Brenan on 14 June 1925, ‘And this I certainly did mean – that Septimus and Mrs Dalloway should be entirely dependent upon each other . . . ’ (Diary, Vol. 3, p. 189). Clarissa is outraged that the Bradshaws should bring a story of death to her party and escapes for a moment to reflect, ‘A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance’ (p. 134).

Septimus, though, however much Woolf might wish him to be dependent on Clarissa, doesn’t know she exists; for it is truly what Clarissa feels and experiences that ultimately matters:

She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. [p. 135]

Assemble herself, assemble the last remaining guests of her party – these and more Clarissa accomplishes with an artist’s deft stroke.

Clarissa Dalloway: The Perfect Hostess

What a lark! What a plunge! [p. 3]

Our introduction into the interior of Clarissa’s thoughts as she steps into the streets

Reviews for Mrs Dalloway

[xicanti_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

MRS DALLOWAY is a stream-of-consciousness look at one day in the life of a society matron and the people she comes into contact with. While Clarissa Dalloway is at the centre, Woolf devotes equal care to those who surround her. The point of view flits from character to character with the speed of thought, and the result is a beautiful, unconventional novel in which plot takes a backseat to character development.I adore good characterization, and Woolf's is lovely. She gives us a real feel for who each of these people is as she invites us to ride around inside their heads and view the world through their eyes. Over a very short period of time, we learn a great deal about each and every one of them. And we don't just see how they view themselves; Woolf also shows us how those around them perceive them. I'll tell you up front, I'm an absolute sucker for anything that invites me to consider its characters in this way. The contrast between each character's view of herself and the way others see her is one of the novel's strongest qualities.The prose is equally good. Even though Woolf deals with the minutia of everyday life, I found the story strange and dreamlike. I think this is due, in large part, to the sudden shifts in POV. One moment, we're hard into Clarissa's perspective; the next, we're deep in Peter Walsh's mind. From him, we jump to someone else... and then to someone else again... and again... and again... Even though the story is grounded in reality, the storytelling makes it feel as though it isn't. It's nicely done.It does, however, make the book a bit difficult to sink into, especially if you've put it down for a while. I had some troubles in that area, and occasionally found that I just couldn't go back to it. I'd read a few lines and decide I needed another break. It's for this reason, more than anything else, that I've decided to pass it along to someone else. I enjoyed it, and I think I'll likely want to read it again, but I doubt I'll return to it any time soon. And when I do, I'm sure there'll be an obliging library or book market ready and waiting to provide me with another copy.(A slightly different version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina).

[liivin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not the most entertaining book but an interesting writing style. Needs good concentration to not miss a change in the storyline.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Mrs. Dalloway” is a classic, considered by some to be the finest modern novel. That sort of recommendation is enough to make me approach carefully; I’m not educated enough to fully appreciate the great works and I find reading them a chore. But I’m happy to say that, although I found the first bit tedious, it didn’t take me long to get sucked into the story. It’s not that the plot is engaging; there is almost no plot. The book is merely a record of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, and that of a few of her friends, and some people that she passes by. We are given access to their thoughts as they go about their day. Clarissa buys flowers, mends a dress, and gives a party. She hosts a visitor, just back from India. She thinks about a girl from her school days, with whom she had been in love. Septimus Smith, suffering from PTSD from WW I and the loss of a fellow soldier with whom he’d been in love, quietly sinks into a fatal madness. The stream of consciousness leads us seamlessly through the minds of these people; there are no chapters to provide breaking points. Wolff’s prose is simply beautiful; she describes the everyday moments that are usually forgotten or ignored as things of beauty. But the book is not just pretty prose; there is surprising depth to some of the characters. Clarissa and Septimus, in particular, although not directly connected, seem to be two sides of the questions of life and death. Five stars.

[oataker-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I reluctantly gave it a high mark because I was eventually won over. She has lots of good moments in the writing, starting with her appreciation of 'life', especially in the context of the recent war, and the wonderful description of a June day. There is a note of regret throughout, about her charmed, but naive youth, and turning down an interesting man's marriage proposal, although he turns out to be hopeless. There are no chapters and the mental meanderings are a bit purple and prolonged at times. But the knives come out for poor Miss Kilman, (interesting choice of name), the Christian who is clearly hated by Dalloway and I imagine by Virginia. Ugly sweaty and poor, though principled. Her influence on daughter Elizabeth seems unlikely. And finally what is it about the Love interest, Peter's pocket knife, which he is constantly fiddling with?

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that gets better every time I read it. I think it is partly due to the ability to follow the streams of consciousness more carefully and closely as you become more familiar with the plot (I had a similar experience with Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury). But this novel also has many layer of meaning and connections to be made by the reader that I'm sure Virginia gave us as part of her marvelous creation. It is a wonderful paean to London.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read Joyce's 'Ulysses' but I get the feeling that it spoiled a lot of modern literature for me; maybe it was a necessary evil to get us where we are today, but it also led to the creation of a lot of difficult, unenjoyable works, such as 'Mrs Dalloway'.No, I didn't enjoy this novel, though I could see why people would think it a classic of the modernist years. The character of Septimus Smith was compelling, with his struggle against madness and war trauma; if he had been the main character I would have made more of the book. It has been left to the likes of Pat Barker to flesh out his tale. Mrs Dalloway herself is hardly of any interest, and I am rather glad that so much else went on in this book.

[sarams_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this book a bit boring. On the other hand, in places the language was brilliant, and I believe I will add some quotes from this book to my collection.

[wcarter_66 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Folio Society edition is a beautifully presented book (one of the best covers of any Folio Society book) with delightful illustrations. The text consists of several thousand superbly crafted paragraphs that circle around numerous perspectives of one day in 1923 and lead - well - absolutely nowhere!

[flydodofly · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poor Mrs. Dalloway, lucky Mrs. Dalloway, silly and ditsy or of sharp perception and many emotions? It is for the reader to decide and Woolf offered a generous base for any further discussions and musings. Such is the case with all the other characters in this short work which is literally full to the brim. As always, it is important to put it into perspective and the context of the times to realise how modern and how very different it is in comparison to other literary work from the same period. The style did not really appeal until the second half, and now I want to re-read it, and I never do that. This time I will. While reading it, I often had to think of Proust's Swann's Way, because of the similar voice (cannot say what exactly, but I was reminded of it all the time), continuous referring to the past, the same observant criticism of the characters and the ephemeral quality of writing which was dealing with complex things and life's many questions.

[baswood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just a few thoughts on one of my all-time favourite novels that I re-read for my book club meeting today. Ever since I saw the film "The Hours" I just can't get Meryl Streep out of my head as the perfect Mrs Dalloway, even though in the film she was Clarissa Vaughn a well to-do American Woman based in modern New York. It is because Streep has that amazing facility to suggest that an awful lot more is going on in her head than would appear to be from the actions she is performing, like when she is on her way to buy some flowers.One of the stars of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is London itself, especially for me because I used to work in the Westminster district where Clarissa Dalloway set out to buy those flowers and I could so easily imagine the sights and sounds as she walked through St James' Park. The passage in the novel where Woolf flits inside the heads of her characters as they pass unknowingly by in the Park is a superb example of the stream of conscious technique. This is one of my all-time favourite sequences and it was a joy to read it again.I have been reading H G Wells early novels and stories recently, written at the turn of the century and the difference in writing styles between them and Woolf's novel written in the 1920's is immense. Books that seem worlds apart.Mrs Dalloway is a short novel it could almost be a novella and yet it can be a tricky read, because it is not always clear where or in whose head the story is taking place, however I think there is enough here to delight even the first time reader, not familiar with the modernist style (of which Woolf was one of the leading exponents). If ever a novel deserved five stars it is this one, I'm already looking forward to my next re-read.

[coolpinkone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A literary feast that boggles the mind and treats all of your senses. Captivating, Enthralling, and very intelligent. A masterpiece of masterpieces... and definitely time for a re-read!!! I can't wait.

[queencersei · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mrs. Dalloway relates the day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an English high-society matron during post-World War I. The novel deftly weaves together snippets of several characters in a stream of consciousness style as Mrs. Dalloway prepares for a party she is hosting that evening. Some of the characters who flit in and out include Clarissa's old flame Peter Walsh. Peter was jilted by Clarissa in their youth. He had moved to India to pursue a career and several failed love affairs and seems out of step with his peers. Septimus Smith is a WW I veteran suffering from shell shock, who is cared for by his Italian wife Rezia. Elizabeth is Clarissa's 17 year old daughter, who seems destined to follow her mother's footsteps, despite not being all that interested in society. Sally Seton is an old friend of Clarissa's who she may have had a lesbian affair with in their youth.Despite several of the characters coming from vastly different backgrounds and some of them never even meeting Mrs. Dalloway, the author does a very good job of knitting these differing points of view together in a coherent and intelligent way.

[eheleneb3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The way certain words can be put together to so powerfully convey a certain emotion or action is one of the magical things about reading for me, and this book exquisitely captures that. I loved this book. I think if I had read it when I was a teenager I would have hated it, because I would not have been able to follow the stream-of-consciousness style and the beauty of the words would have been lost on me. However, reading it as an adult I took sheer pleasure in the way Woolf describes the most every day occurrences and emotions. This is not a book to be rushed, nor is it (really) a plot-driven book. It focuses on the way we as human beings move through time; how we spend our days, the way we think, how things we experience motivate us to think a certain way or to do a certain thing. Beautiful!

[kdabra4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The entire story takes place over a single day, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa) planning for a society party she is throwing that evening, because that's what she does and that's what she's good at. Her thoughts about nearly everything under the sun are shared with us through some very long and complicated sentences; then one thought leads to another; then her old love Peter stops by for a visit, leading to a perfect segue into his thoughts and meanderings about life, love, and regrets; then he goes out for a stroll and there’s someone else, such as Septimus and his wife (who Clarissa also ran into on her earlier jaunt), and Septimus is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from serving in the first World War and seeing his friend blown to bits, with no feelings at this juncture about anything/anyone, other than a desire to kill himself, much to the distress of his immigrant wife, who wants nothing more than to have a baby. The entire book is like this review, just a stream of thoughts and characterizations, making me wish Woolf would stop obsessing what time it is and get back to what Clarissa is up to, and will we ever get to this exalted party? I did enjoy the storyline buried deep down in there somewhere, if only the sentences weren’t quite so... so like they are! Great commentary on society and the after effects of war.

[stevejwales · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic novel, but to say I enjoyed it might not be exactly the right word as it's not an easy read. It still feels experimental, even nearly 100 years after it was first published, with its stream-of-consciousness style deftly flitting from the mind of one person to the next. All of the characters, however brief a glimpse you get into their heads, feel like complete, real people.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have yet to wade into too terribly much of Joyce's brand of steam of consciousness, but so far find Woolf's angles more accessible. Mrs. Dalloway's day of interior monologue makes her one of the most luminous characters in fiction.

[pzmiller_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I only read this book when I got partway through Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" and realized I had to first read "Mrs. Dalloway" to appreciate "The Hours." I'm so glad I stopped to read this book because it is wonderful in its own right.

[ladydzura · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mrs. Dalloway is one of those novels that I've been meaning to read for ages but would usually get passed over in favor of something less intimidating. I dipped in and out of it for the better part of a month and a half, and finally steeled myself to finish off the last sixty pages one evening towards the end of last week. And then when I was done, I thought, 'that's it?'The entirety of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during the course of one day, with the story taking place as the reader follows the various characters around London. The story flows from one character to another as they interact -- and I use the word 'interact' loosely here, maybe 'encounter' is better for some of them -- with each other, culminating with Clarissa Dalloway's party at the end of the evening, where everything all kind of ties together.I wasn't an English major, so I can't begin to understand the complexities and subtleties that are most likely hiding in this work. I've never read Ulysses by James Joyce, either, a novel to which Mrs. Dalloway is (apparently) often paralleled, so there goes more that I might be missing. While I did enjoy reading about each of the characters and getting little glimpses of what makes them tick as they communicate with each other, this is, at times, a very tedious book.At some point in the future, I'll probably give it another try in hopes of getting more from it, and I also intend to give To the Lighthouse a go. But I can't say that Mrs. Dalloway will ever make my list of favorites.

[pathogenik-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Oh my was I disappointed?!
This one is better than 'to the lighthouse', that's for sure. But, it was dull, boring, uninteresting, confusing. I skimmed through it and understood the story, some ideas were good, some descriptions were good, she can write, but she's not my cup of tea. This didn't irritate me as much as 'to the lighthouse' , but it was very .. what's the word? ... meh! Very meh! I don't know why everyone like it so much, I frankly don't understand the hype around Woolf, her writing is incoherent. She is the only one who really knows about her characters, they keep appearing out of nowhere, many narrators, lots of names, lost of things she mentions hastily, things we do not know, I dare say she is a snobbish egocentric writer who doesn't feel like giving the reader a chance to understand her mind, or her plot. lots of missing information, cold writing style, and it isn't cool or smart, it's just as if she doesn't want to share with the reader, it only makes perfect sense to her, and we gotta put the pieces together while she's turning her back to us... Camus was very cold in 'the stranger' , but he wasn't deluding or confusing the reader. This is my piece of mind, anyways, this writer is overrated, I believe! Many contemporary writers have more respect for their readers' intellect than she did.

[smiler69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

All the action within this novel takes place during one day and evening as Mrs Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class woman, is first preparing for, then throws a party in the evening. While still at home before she sets out to run her errands, she is visited by Peter Walsh, a man she's known since she was a young girl and who once asked her to marry him. For the whole of the novel, we wander from one stream of thoughts to another, with Clarissa's mind wandering from the moment's happenings and backwards into the past, then without preamble we are following Peter's thoughts, then Clarissa's husband and so on, with the author's focus wandering between every person encountered in the novel. Clarissa thinks about the life choices she has made. Peter has just come back from India and is seeking a divorce from his wife now that he has fallen in love with a much younger married woman. Clarissa's husband has bought her flowers and intends to tell her he loves her, something he presumably hasn't said in a very long time. There is Doris Kilman, the teacher of Clarissa's daughter Elizabeth, who, while she venerates the young girl to a degree that borders on desire (or as much desire as a religious fanatic will make allowances for), despises her mother Clarissa for all she stands for as a society woman living a life of ease and luxury. We meet Septimus Warren Smith, sitting in the park with his wife; he is a war veteran suffering from a very bad case of shell-shock who is being treated for suicidal depression. His wife is concerned because he talks to himself and to his deceased army friend Evans, who may have been much more than just a buddy, and together they are waiting to meet a psychiatrist who will suggest a course of treatment for the young man. I had a couple of false stars with this book over the years, never making it past the first couple of pages, and must say one needs to be in the right frame of mind to fully appreciate this short, yet very profound novel. Having just finished reading A Room of One's Own I found myself in the right mood for more of Woolf's deep reflections on life and how we are affected by circumstances and the people we are surrounded by, whether by choice or happenstance. Once one gets accustomed to the flow of words, which doesn't follow a traditional narrative style with chapters and commentary, but pours forth in an organic way meant to mimic a real-life experience, one is transported by the portraits Woolf paints of these people, whom we get to know from the inside out, as opposed to the other way round. Because of this, there is a timeless quality to this novel, even though the events it alludes to are very much fixed in the London of the 1920s.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first time I read this book it fell flat. Several years later I read The Hours, which is based on Mrs Dalloway, and thought it was wonderful, which made me think I should re-read the original someday. And this time I appreciated it so much more; in fact, I loved it. From the opening sentence, when Clarissa Dalloway leaves her house to buy flowers for a party she is hosting that evening, I was immediately immersed in the atmosphere of a beautiful London morning. Woolf moves seamlessly from Clarissa to other characters and other places, using events like a passing car to get the reader to “look” in another direction and observe other vignettes in the London scene. This flow continues throughout the novel, as Clarissa prepares for the party and others go about their days. Some characters will attend the party; others have more symbolic dramatic roles. By the end of the party, the characters have all been woven together into a tight and often moving narrative flow.

[beequiet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic example of the stream of consciousness style of writing. We learn more through the silences, the sections when Dalloway thinks that surely she should be happy...so why isn't she? That tell us more than what is spoken directly. Modern society and the demands on 'successful' women is the focus of this piece, with its frivolities hiding the ache resting beneath. A real work of art. Not my type of content really, but the poetic nature of the prose carried me along and made it wonderful to read in its own way.

[ceilidhann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A modernist classic, perfect use of the steam-of-consciousness narrative technique and a beautiful story overall. A bit difficult to read but once you get use to the style it's much easier.

[ericakline · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this. Woolf's usual rather chaotic style, but pretty readable. A woman, her life and loves. She's not perfect or noble, perhaps even somewhat ordinary; yet she's somehow very special also.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was like the Log Ride at Astroworld...once you climb in, you can't stop. Virginia Woolf seems to try to be as honest and true as she can, even when what she writes is horribly painful.

[nicolehc_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's okay. Worth reading. Just to say you've read it.

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2010, Naxos Audiobooks, Read by Juliet StevensonI read Night and Day several months ago, quite enjoyed it, and wanted to follow it with another of Woolf’s novels. I chose Mrs. Dalloway because it is the best known and most widely acclaimed. Juliet Stevenson, narrator of this Naxos Audiobook edition, is fabulous – an exquisite reader.Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in June 1923, as lived by Clarissa Dalloway and several other London citizens. The eponymous protagonist is a wealthy, middle-aged socialite who is planning an evening party. Running parallel to Clarissa’s story is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of WWI; he is withdrawn, delusional, possibly on the brink of madness. The two stories intersect at the conclusion of the novel. Themes in Mrs. Dalloway include existentialism, madness, loneliness, and fear of death.The entirely of the novel is written in stream of consciousness, which for me is both its strength and its atrophy. Woolf’s prose is beautiful, and I can appreciate her genius in fusing third person omniscient point of view with first person interior monologue; but I do not enjoy this style of writing. Fleeting transitions between characters make the prose difficult to follow, and there are no breaks in the writing, chapter or otherwise. The audiobook consisted of one track of over seven hours. In addition, the novel has no discernible plot; it explores its various themes through the musings and meanderings of characters’ thoughts. And, truthfully, I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable. Septimus Warren Smith promises to be at least relatable, but even he is somehow blank.I much preferred Night and Day to this later novel; the characters were decidedly more likeable and relatable, and the plot of the novel had some structure. I can appreciate Mrs. Dalloway but will not reread. I also do not widely recommend the novel, but I do recommend it to those who read strictly to observe literary form and genre.

[millata_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was disappointed with this book for some reason. Perhaps my expectations were too high but I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It was pleasant enough to finish but it didn't make my must-read-again list.

[amandrake_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Virginia Woolf, like lobster - understandably praised, but not to my taste. I understand it was a fundamental rethinking of the novel, and her writing can be lovely, but it is a bunch of characters in whom I am just not interested. On the plus side, it's easily readable.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was quite leery of reading Mrs. Dalloway, my second Virginia Woolf as I wasn’t a fan of my first attempt, Jacob’s Room. Once again the dreaded words “stream of consciousness” arose and I approached the book with trepidation. I chose to listen to the book as read by Juliet Stevenson, and this was an excellence choice as she did a stellar job and made the book come alive.Mrs. Dalloway is a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post WW I England. Mrs. Dalloway’s main concerns revolve around relationships and connections. On this particular day she is preparing to host a party and as she goes through the day getting ready for the evening, she muses on her past relationships and how her life has turned out. One gets the sense that somewhere along the way, she has lost her inner self to the Mayfair hostess she shows to the outside world.We don’t spend the whole book locked in Mrs. Dalloways’ head. There is another storyline that runs parallel to that of Clarissa’s. This one involves a war veteran, Septimus Smith and his wife Lucrezia. Septimus is suffering from post traumatic stress and although he and Clarissa do not meet on this day, his actions are to affect her. We also meet and are given an insight into her past with encounters with her past suitor, Peter Walsh and her childhood best friend Sally Seton.Surprise, surprise! I loved this book. The author was able to place me inside this woman’s head and make me privy to her inner most thoughts. Although some would find her shallow and selfish, I found myself relating to her. I think most everyone thinks about their choices and wonder what life would be like if they had chosen a different path. This is a short book but is packed with unforgettable images and beautiful language and ultimately is a story about wasted potential.