Mrs. Dalloway

What might be on the surface a three-line story cluttered by flighty streams of consciousness, is so layered, so complementary and interwoven and with hints of deeper psychology that the scattered thoughts of a group of people over the course of a day somehow captures a nuanced study of the human condition, as well as an inwardly-repressed-but-outwardly-jubilant-and-grateful attitude particular to post-WWI London.

The streams of consciousness prose is surprisingly and yet also unsurprisingly natural. If the novel had been edited to read more "straightforward", it would lose its gentle mellifluousness and make more jarring the often cinematic manner the streams leap from one point of view to another. It was a beautiful way of connecting show more people and time, the way, say, we see the skywriting plane from one character from one side of a park, zoom in to plane in the sky and zoom out into the thoughts of another character on the other side of the park, or the way we are lead through the thoughts of the people the car passes in the opening scene. In fact, the literary manner of this internal monologue segue can be employed much more obliquely than permitted on film through an extra dimension of a wordplay segue, the example from the novel I forgot to mark. The in-line, unparagraphed dialogues were also effectively employed to allow for an uninterrupted flow between internal and external speeches.

There is so much literary analysis and point of views to be excavated from the mere two hundred pages that it definitely bears a reread in the future, at the latest at the age of fifty-two with recommended first-time reading age of the -teen age. My copy of the book contains an insightful introduction from Elaine Showalter who brought my attention to, amongst other literary details, how easily the proportions of the book could have been thrown into disarray, and thus added to my appreciation of the complexity and cohesion of the novel. show less

“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. show more 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. show less

I'm reading through Virginia Woolf's work and this book is both my first on the theme, and my first book of the year. It's a surprisingly difficult novel on a simple single day in the life of a of the wife of a not quite successful MP, who is throwing party in her Westminster home for friends and political connections. The Prime Minister will stop by. But the novel is anything but simple, and the reader can tell this right away from the famous opening line, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.". The complexity is in every moment, in every sentence, and it's really glorious. The narrative doesn't stay with Clarissa Dalloway, but roams around various characters with various perspectives and issues. We see the same show more events, or the same times of the day, from different characters who know nothing about what our last character just experienced. The narrative has the reader making associations all over the place, between characters and perspectives, between times, between now and wherever their memories take them, and how the events and feelings in these memories fit into who these characters are right now. And all of this is just the bones, the structure into how Woolf brings about the affects she is trying to create.

I'm going to say here, I'm not her best reader. But I adored this book, and everything about it. I enjoyed hacking away at it, paragraph by paragraph. When I was sharp, it was a "quick" 3 minutes a page. When tired, impossible. When in between there was a lot of rereading. There was a lot of rereading anyway. And a lot of notes.

The story of Mrs. Dalloway is only partially about our central figure. First, it's a contrast. We see our a settled, pat, confused in life and herself, changing, menopausal, fading, wealthy, sheltered, shallow but also appealing Mrs. Dalloway in parallel with Septimus Smith, a WWI veteran and war hero who lost his ability to feel after the war, and eventually, by the time we get here on this one day, his mind. The entire novel takes place on June 23, 1923, in some dialogue with [Ulysses] which has a similar one-day in June take. The other reason it's not about Clarissa Dalloway, nee Parry, is because we spend so much time in the minds and views of so many other characters - Peter Walsh, her childhood love-interest, Rezia, the loving and worried Italian wife of Septimus, Lady Rosseter - nee Sally Seton - a savvy childhood friend, the well-educated Doris Kilman who lost her wealth and has become impoverished and religious, Elizabeth Dalloway - Clarissa's daughter, Richard Dalloway, her husband, political influencer Lady Mullicent Bruton who admires Richard, Ellie Henderson - Clarissa's discarded childhood friend, and many others.

A few impressions by paragraph:

We are deep in modernism. Now, this moment, this stream of consciousness, also means deep emotional dives into the past. And it means technology in life. Back-firing cars and noisy airplanes advertising with smoke, whaling ambulances. We walk the streets around Westminster and Regents Park. We ride the bus and feel the weather, which blows into windows. Private noises make their way onto the city streets, and the pedestrians' imaginations. We are rich in sensation and changing perspectives. (The introduction compares these changing perspectives to cinema and to Cubism.)

And we are deep in Woolf's elegance. Loneliness is conveyed by the "trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness" at night. Peter, just off a boat from India, reflects "the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar square overcame him." An attractive woman disappears "as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over the hedges in the darkness." Or Clarissa, momentarily, before it passes "cried, as a sleeper in the night, starts and stretches a hand in the darkness." And, near the end at the party, Clarissa steps in a quiet room, and "The party's splender fell to the floor..."

And we are in time. The long working title of this novel in draft form, for a couple years, was "The Hours". Time rings as Big Ben tolls through the day. Time effects everyone - the decades of their pasts, the biological clocks. Clarissa is 52, dealing with menopause. Walsh, the same age, is in an outright mid-life crisis. The book is peppered with women from all different stages of their lives, from childhood and elderly.

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One of many interesting aspects of this book is the way it came about. Woolf's original plan was to write six loosely connected short stories. But she felt a need to connect them in the narrative. And she slowly reworked and developed her novel over several years, reworking the style until she felt comfortable, reworking the structure, adding major characters later in the process. What's cool is all this is documented because Woolf wrote everything out in longhand in her notebooks and we still have them. So every variation is preserved. See more here, including a notebook: https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/introduction-to-mrs-dalloway/

I'll conclude by noting, as I'm prone to, that as much as I try, I can't capture what this book is doing, or how it does it. How all within is mixed together in a stream of conscious, keeping the reader in string of associations within the book. And how it touches our own lives. The life trajectory is in here. Clarissa has lived, and now past her best years, she will be looking to preparing herself for death, even at only age 52. She is at the cusp, just over it, on the downward slide. And us, dear readers, washed over with the prose, the structure and experience, the cast of characters, and so many Shakespeare references, can't help but seeing our own lives end to end, as we read this, and orienting our present within our full lifeline. Perhaps the book is a little call to life.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/377230#9085268 show less

Despite having read and loved A Room of One's Own, I had not yet read any of Woolf's fiction. Actually, I had attempted to read this once before, but my brain bounced right off of it, so I put it back on the shelves for another time.

THIS WAS THAT TIME.

Listen, I am fully aware that I missed a lot of this book. I know almost nothing of London, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully realize that this takes place right after WWI, not WWII. There were parts of this book that I strained to focus on. But when it sang for me it REALLy sang.

Mrs. Dalloway is a society wife preparing to throw a party that evening. She leaves the house to pick up some flowers, and the novel bounces from person to person as they encounter each other, show more always circling Mrs. Dalloway and her upcoming party — including her husband, various guests, an old suitor, the doctors of a man who came home from the war altered, women who resent Mrs. Dalloway, people who admire her, her daughter... along the way painting a portrait of a moment in time among a certain social class.

I am glad I finally manipulated myself into reading this one, and hope in the future I will be less "afraid of Virginia Woolf," as there are a number of her other novels on my shelves, long neglected. show less

This book is why I give three stars to many books I enjoyed reading. If I were to give every good book five stars, then I’d have to try to find a way to give this one ten.

I’ll admit, though, that I made a stab at it many years ago and didn’t get very far. Sometimes, there is the right time for a book. In this case, I picked it up again one hundred years after it was published, on a June day, much like the one on which Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers for the party she will give that evening.

The stream of consciousness and change from Clarissa’s perspective to that of other characters, particularly that of her polar opposite, Septimus Warren Smith, drew me in. Above all, I was taken with the appreciation of the miracle show more of life (in each precious moment) in the face of our awareness of death. This recurs in Clarissa’s thoughts but is also felt by others, for instance, Peter Walsh, an old suitor who returns from India that day: “By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation.” show less

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 show more 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. show less

Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf
Audio performance by Juliet Stevenson (4 star performance)
3 stars

I started with the audio. I found that my attention continually wandered away from the wandering narrative. I don’t usually have trouble attending to an audiobook, but if I followed my own stream of consciousness for even 30 seconds, I completely lost the thread of Virginia Woolf’s meandering prose.

I began again with the printed text. I headed out with Clarissa Dalloway to buy some flowers, ran into Hugh Whitbread … and I couldn’t keep my eyes open, just waiting for something to happen.

Eventually, I listened to Juliet Stevenson read, with her perfect inflections, while I had the text in front of my eyes. After a while, I was able to show more appreciate the flow of the language and the cinematic change of viewpoints. This is an incredible, perfectly crafted piece of writing. I could almost feel Woolf agonizing over the precise wording and exact placement of each word and punctuation mark.

It felt artificial. Was that deliberate? She was, in fact, portraying the artificial lives of people who exist isolated inside their personal facades. I can admire the final product, this iconic piece literature. I just didn’t like it. It took a great deal of effort to read. At the end, I didn’t care enough about any of the characters to feel that if was worth the effort. show less