virginia woolf mrs dalloway essay

A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One of the most celebrated and important modernist novels in English, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best novel. Originally titled ‘The Hours’, a title that Michael Cunningham would retrieve and use for his 1998 novel based on Mrs Dalloway and Woolf’s own life (a book that would in turn be adapted for the 2002 film starring Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose), Mrs Dalloway is at once a powerful response to the First World War and a lyrical exploration of the role of memory itself.

Before we offer an analysis of Mrs Dalloway , it might be worth briefly summarising the plot.

Mrs Dalloway : plot summary

There are two interwoven narratives in Woolf’s novel. One concerns a day in the life of a middle-aged upper-class woman, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares to throw a party that evening. During the course of the day she is visited by Peter Walsh, her old flame from the days before she married Richard Dalloway, an MP.

Throughout the course of her day, Clarissa reflects upon her choice of husband and remembers her friendship with Peter as well as with a woman, Sally Seton, towards whom she may have had stronger feelings than friendship.

The other narrative concerns Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the First World War, who is suffering from shell-shock or PTSD. He and his wife Lucrezia attend several appointments with London doctors and pass some time in a London park, before Septimus is taken to a psychiatric hospital. He takes his own life by throwing himself out of the window of his room and onto the railings below.

That evening, Clarissa throws her party, at which one of the guests mentions the news of Septimus’ death. Although she didn’t know him, Mrs Dalloway goes to a room by herself and thinks about him. She appears to admire his act of defiance in ending his life.

Mrs Dalloway : analysis

Woolf’s novel was inspired by her reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses , which was published in book form in 1922 but had been appearing in the Little Review since 1918. Woolf was drawn to the idea of writing a novel set over the course of just one day. Like Joyce, she chose a day in June.

But she had her reservations about Joyce’s obsession with what she saw as the more squalid side of life – sex and bodily functions – and went as far as to describe Ulysses as ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. Her approach would be different.

If you were to ask ‘What is Mrs Dalloway about?’ you would have to make do with some pretty unsatisfying responses. ‘A woman throwing a party.’ ‘A response to the First World War.’ The first of these is a (very crude) summary of the main ‘plot’ of the book, in so far as it has a plot; the second points up an important context for the novel.

But Mrs Dalloway touches upon a host of themes, from depression (which Woolf had experienced first-hand) to lost love to regret to joy to memory and a whole range of other emotions and mental states. Woolf herself said that the novel was about ‘the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side – something like that.’

But this threatens to draw too firm a line between the ‘sane’ (Mrs Dalloway) and the ‘insane’ (Septimus Smith). Are they both mad? Or are they both sane? What does ‘sane’ mean here?

‘Subjectivity’ is the watchword for Mrs Dalloway , given that it follows a number of characters through the course of their day. This is perhaps most neatly exemplified by the sky-writing scene, in which an aeroplane soars over the London skyline, inscribing mysterious and transitory letters on the heavens. Woolf was inspired to write this scene after the Daily Mail first used sky-writing to advertise their newspaper in 1922.

But what this aeroplane is advertising – if it is advertising something – remains a mystery to those observers down on the ground. It could be toffee, muses one character. But the meaningless sequence of letters – A C E L K E Y – don’t provide much help. Different characters draw different conclusions as to what the odd message represents.

Septimus Smith, the war veteran who is afflicted by shell-shock and depression (his marriage, too, is falling down around him), interprets the sky-writing as a quasi-divine message from the heavens, somehow meant for him and him alone. In a memorable passage, Septimus experiences a feeling of ecstasy as he gazes up at the letters:

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.

Note how ‘language’ slips into ‘languishing’, the sounds of those two words mirroring the breaking up of the smoke letters in the air but also the dissolution of any clear, objective perspective.

And if we were to attempt a comprehensive answer to the question, ‘What is Mrs Dalloway about?’, one could do worse than to answer, ‘The struggle to stand out as a meaningful individual in a world of fast-moving, faceless, and crowded modernity.’ Mrs Dalloway is, like another work of modernism, T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land , a text that sets out to depict the modern world: a world of the metropolis (London, as with Eliot’s poem), motorcars, aeroplanes, and other recent phenomena.

This is the world not only of the aeroplane but of the motorcar, which calls up Henry Ford, that pioneer of the production line and the man who (apocryphally) said that you can have his Model-T Ford car in any colour so long as it’s black. Modernity, the novel seems to say, has rendered us like those production-line cars: we have lost our individuality and it has become more difficult to stand out.

Of course, human beings had recently been treated like assembly-line objects in the first mass industrial war: the First World War, in which Septimus Smith had fought, was the war of the Ford motorcar generation: assembly-line slaughter.

And this points to another theme of Mrs Dalloway which is worthy of analysis: the tension or contrast between clock-like regularity and the free-flowing nature of subjective experience. On the one hand, Woolf’s novel is full of reminders of the attempt – especially the Victorian attempt – to render everything regular, orderly, and scientifically knowable.

The two doctors who attempt to treat Septimus for his PTSD are named Holmes and Bradshaw, with their very names summoning the empirical forensic detective of Conan Doyle’s short stories and the name of the ubiquitous railway timetable. Big Ben, too – another Victorian creation, dating from 1859 – is a reminder of the clock-like regularity of everyday life.

But cutting across this is the life of the mind, the emotionally diverse and daydreaming world of the novel’s characters: Peter Walsh’s weird fantasies about the women he sees on the streets; Septimus’ flashbacks to his friendship with (and more than comradely feelings for?) his fellow soldier, Evans; and Clarissa’s own recollections of her youthful flirtation with Peter at Bourton.

Time for these characters cannot be pinned down to the sixty minutes of the ‘hours’ that Big Ben marks: it operates according to what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called ‘ duration ’, the subjective experience of passing time.

Such an understanding of time and memory is obviously well-served by Virginia Woolf’s free-flowing style in the novel. However, whether this can be labelled ‘stream of consciousness’ is another matter. Like ‘free verse’ and modernist poetry, this term tends to be a catch-all label slapped onto any work of modernist fiction which shows even the slightest departure from conventional narrative modes.

Well, not exactly. Randall Stevenson, in his excellent book Modernist Fiction: An Introduction , suggests that ‘interior monologue’, rather than stream of consciousness, is the best term to describe the style of Woolf’s fiction. Although there is some overlap between these terms, Stevenson helpfully draws attention to what he calls the ‘anarchic fluency’ and ‘syntactic fragmentation’ which we find in more extreme examples of modernist stream of consciousness. We have discussed this distinction in more detail here .

In her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ – an essay far less famous than it should be – Woolf remarked, ‘Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed.’ Mrs Dalloway marks the true beginning of her attempt to capture these perceptions: her previous novel, Jacob’s Room , had begun to sketch out the terrain, but it was in this novel that she would successfully achieve it.

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Mrs Dalloway

Virginia woolf.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Mrs Dalloway: Introduction

Mrs dalloway: plot summary, mrs dalloway: detailed summary & analysis, mrs dalloway: themes, mrs dalloway: quotes, mrs dalloway: characters, mrs dalloway: symbols, mrs dalloway: literary devices, mrs dalloway: quizzes, mrs dalloway: theme wheel, brief biography of virginia woolf.

Historical Context of Mrs Dalloway

Other books related to mrs dalloway.

• Full Title: Mrs Dalloway
• When Written: 1922-24
• Where Written: London and Sussex
• When Published: 1925
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Modernist Fiction
• Setting: London, England
• Climax: Clarissa learns of Septimus’s suicide
• Antagonist: Dr. Holmes, Sir William Bradshaw
• Point of View: Third person omniscient, free indirect discourse

Extra Credit for Mrs Dalloway

Other Mrs. Dalloways. Characters named “Mrs. Dalloway” also appear in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out and in five of her stories, though they don’t all seem to be the same woman.

The Hours. One of Woolf’s original titles for the novel was “The Hours,” and Michael Cunningham wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with this title in 1998. This book, which concerns three women whose lives are affected by Mrs. Dalloway , was then made into an Oscar-winning movie of the same name.

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Virginia Woolf’s Novel Mrs. Dalloway Essay

Mrs. Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf presents a unique narrative style where the readers come to know the story through the words of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, they read about her feelings, emotions and thoughts. The story is a portrait of a middle-aged woman that Woolf paints utilizing Clarissa’s thoughts and actions that eventually help her convert the ideology of life of the English middle class and describe the cultural sphere of the time in a novel. This paper analyses Mrs. Dalloway as a classic example of the use of stream of consciousness by Woolf to portray the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway as a vivacious bearer of life as opposed to the deathly pale world of Septimus Smith.

Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist of the novel, is a middle-aged woman who was about to throw a party at her home the day which was described in the novel. The author leads us through the life of this woman for that day and explores the various facets of life. The novel begins with Clarissa walking down the road, shopping for her party that is going to be held in the evening. Through the description of the woman and how she manages her daily affairs we see Clarissa as the one who is taking immense pleasure in life and all its physical and sensual sides. Clarissa is found on the street purchasing flowers and appreciating everything she sees: “carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing” ( Mrs. Dalloway 4).

Clarissa neither approves nor disapproves the exciting and bustling urban life. In fact, she is lost in a world of her own, a cocoon that remains unobstructed by the bustling city life. In her delight, Clarissa is free from egotism and judgment. Her outlook on life is nonjudgmental as she does not approve a thing for what it is but because it is. Clarissa enjoys just being a part of life and her view on life is one that is ingrained in the wonders of existence. She is serious about life and takes living seriously. Since Clarissa’s love for life is nonjudgmental she does not categorize her affection neither does she coerces: “Had she ever tried to covert anyone herself? Did she not wish everyone merely to themselves?” ( Mrs. Dalloway 126).

The free spirit of Clarissa clashes with the dominant patriarchal society of her time. The grammar of masculinity needs to define the subject and the object of power in order to create the dominant sex. Woolf, through Clarissa, distinctly differentiates love, compassion, and sacrifice as distinctly feminine characters while judgment and hierarchy are strictly expressed as male characters. This confirms Woolf’s belief as a feminist writer in her nonfictional work A Room of One’s Own where she describes the gender role discrimination prevalent during her time in the English society ( A Room fo One’s Own 12).

The character of Clarissa is based on the essence of her belief in love and existence. Clarissa’s thoughts are centered on the moment and the readers enter her mind that focuses on the moment from the very first line. Clarissa’s life rests in the moment, though she is not completely aware of her point of view: “But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab” ( Mrs. Dalloway 29). The stream of consciousness of Clarissa’s self abounds the sense of self and thus dissolves in her awareness of the basic physical existence.

Clarissa is the one who is mixed with life not only through the sense of life but also through her awareness of the physical existence of life. Peter notes Clarissa’s fear of death in the novel. Clarissa associates her desolated attic room with her loneliness in marriage and death. Her bed, no longer a symbol of her marriage, marital happiness, and fertility, becomes a symbol of her shrinking life and mind and symbolizes her coffin ( Mrs. Dalloway 31). Peter expresses Clarissa’s philosophy of life and death when she was young as: “Since our apparitions, other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death” ( Mrs. Dalloway 153).

Thus, in other words, it can be understood as an existential philosophy, which states that even though the physical entity ceases to be at the moment, the memory remains. Thus, the remains of their youth are portrayed clearly in Clarissa and Peter’s memory and therefore for Clarissa, they remain as “present”. Thus, in this dichotomy of past and present Clarissa confronts her self – her marriage, her affection and/or resentment for Peter, and her half-awareness of her love for other women.

Thus, in Dalloway human experiences are merged together into a mesh of experiences, imagination, and memory. In this novel, Woolf shows the existing network of communication between individuals that forms the character of the person. For example, Lady Burton muses on how Hugh and Richard still remain with her even after they leave, “as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which … became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour” ( Mrs. Dalloway 112). However, Woolf acutely shows the difference berween the sensibility of the sexes as Richard, on his way back, snaps his connection to Lady Burton with a conscious awareness of his bond with Clarissa.

The connection between Septimus and Clarissa also presents a unique turn to the novel. The story is about Clarissa Dalloway and other contrasting characters that the true balance of the novel is achieved. The main characters of the novel resemble weights in a weighing machine that balance out one another. The characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith simply demonstrate this idea. Both Clarissa and Septimus are like their alter egos, two lives that almost never intersect, but run parallel to present to the readers two parallel sensibilities.

Both characters are similar and different at the same time, creating a juxtaposition and balance in the novel. Thus, through Septimus’s character, the readers get to understand the real Clarissa. Woolf calls Septimus Clarissa’s double, but she never pays a lot of attention to this character. When she hears of Septimus’ death from Bradshaw, it alters her mood, and she muses over the deeper meaning of her party at that moment. Clarissa thinks of Septimus’s suicide and her thoughts engulf her. The juxtaposition of the two characters, so different from one another, in two parallel worlds in the same story brings out the characters more intensely.

Clarissa is full of life and Septimus is a muse of death in that lively environment. Clarissa is able to loose herself, while Septimus holds himself tightly to his own ego. Thus, these two characters, juxtaposed in two different worlds, bring forth the character’s intensity. Mrs. Dalloway, therefore, presents an intense character of Clarissa juxtaposed to the morose, gloomy character of Septimus to bring out the plot more strongly. This ‘othering’ of the two characters helps readers realize other characters.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. A Room fo One’s Own. New York: Penguine, 2001. Print.

—. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Penguine Classics, 1999. Print.

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Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel written by Virginia Woolf and published in 1925. The novel follows Mrs. Dalloway, a middle-aged woman, as she goes about her day in London. Mrs. Dalloway is a complex character, and the novel explores her inner thoughts and feelings as she interacts with the people around her.

The novel has been praised for its innovative use of stream of consciousness, which allows readers to experience Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts and feelings as if they were their own. Mrs. Dalloway is considered one of Woolf’s most successful novels, and it remains popular with readers today.

A day-in-the-life narrative like Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” folds back and forth in time, looking at one woman’s life choices and one man’s postwar nightmare. Clarissa Dalloway, a “perfect hostess” in her early fifties, examines her past decisions of 30 years ago. Septimus Warren Smith, intended to be Clarissa’s “duplicate,” is the shell-shocked war veteran who suffers delayed flashbacks over the death of a buddy during the war. The book follows two parallel stories: that of Clarissa and her unknown “double,” whom she has never met.

Mrs. Dalloway is a portrait of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner, from morning to night on Wednesday, June 14, 1923. Mrs. Dalloway is also the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran who is slowly going mad. The novel Mrs. Dalloway is set in London after World War I. Mrs. Dalloway begins with Clarissa’s preparations for a party she will give that evening. She reflects on her past and on the choices she has made in her life.

Meanwhile, Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran suffering from shell shock, is being treated by Dr. Bradshaw. Septimus hears voices and believes that he is being followed. He is also troubled by the death of his friend Evans in the war. Later, Clarissa goes to Bond Street to buy flowers for her party. She meets Peter Walsh, an old flame who has come back to London from India. They talk about their lives and the choices they have made.

Clarissa returns home and continues to prepare for her party. Septimus’s wife, Rezia, takes him for a walk in the park in an attempt to lift his spirits. However, Septimus becomes increasingly agitated and believes that he sees Evans’s ghost. He runs away from Rezia and commits suicide by jumping out of a window. Mrs. Dalloway ends with Clarissa at her party, where she is surrounded by her friends and feels happy and content.

Septimus and Clarissa’s lives are linked by events in time and space, such as Clarissa’s party at night, a motor vehicle passing both, and an airplane overhead. The two are further connected via the writer’s use of various poetic techniques such as imagery and “literary echoes,” which connect them. Septimus and Clarissa also parallel each other and contrast in many areas of character portrayal, including their emotional issues, their marriage, their pasts, suicidal impulses, and homosexual relationships.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of Clarissa’s journey to self-awareness and Septimus’ journey to insanity and death. Mrs. Dalloway is also a study of the effects of time, both past and present, on the human condition.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses a number of literary devices to create connections between the characters and events in the novel. One such device is the use of imagery. Woolf uses images of nature to contrast the internal states of her characters. For example, when Septimus first sees Rezia, he is struck by her beauty and compares her to a woodland creature: “She was like a deer running with the hounds” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 12).

The image of the deer contrasts with Septimus’ own internal state of being hunted by his memories of the war. Rezia, on the other hand, is described as being “like a bird building its nest” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 12). The image of the bird building its nest contrasts with Septimus’ view of Clarissa as a cold, unyielding woman.

Woolf also uses literary echoes to connect the characters and events in Mrs. Dalloway. A literary echo is a repetition of a certain phrase or idea in different contexts. For example, the novel opens with Clarissa hearing the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which “tinkled like a silver bell” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 3).

This image is echoed later in the novel when Septimus hears the same bells and has a vision of Clarissa: “And then he saw Mrs. Dalloway herself coming out of a shop with a parcel done up in tissue paper” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 145). The image of the tinkling bells connects Clarissa and Septimus, two characters who are otherwise quite different.

Clarissa, on the other hand, will diverge from Septimus in that she fulfills her societal duty whereas he refuses to do so and kills himself the night of Clarissa’s party. Virginia Woolf is able to link the seemingly disparate travels of Clarissa and Septimus by utilizing time and space.

Their stories occur on a single June day in 1923 in London, when 16-year-old Clarissa walks out with her friend Elizabeth onto what is known as Birdcage Walk (today Embankment). The event concludes with a nighttime gathering. The occasion isn’t just looked forward to by Clarissa and her guests; it’s also anticipated as a great social affair.

It is also a symbol of Mrs. Dalloway’s success in life, as someone who has managed to move up in the social ranks and be accepted by high society. The party is also significant because it allows Virginia Woolf to bring together all of the characters who have been previously introduced, including those who are only fleetingly mentioned.

While “Mrs. Dalloway” may appear to be a simple story about a day in the life of its titular character, it is actually a complex study of human psychology and relationships. Virginia Woolf uses Clarissa as a vehicle to explore the lives of people around her and to examine the role that memory plays in our lives. Mrs. Dalloway is not simply a novel about one woman’s life; it is a novel about the lives of all people, and how our past experiences shape who we are.

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A Lifetime of Lessons in “Mrs. Dalloway”

In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote about a peculiarity that runs through all real works of art. The books of certain writers (she was speaking of Charlotte Brontë at the time) seem to shape-shift with each reading. The plot might become comfortingly familiar, but the emotional revelations within it change. Scenes once passed over as unimportant begin to prickle with new meaning, as if time itself had been the missing ingredient for understanding them. Woolf went on to describe the works she returned to again and again:

At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

For me, “ Mrs. Dalloway ” is such a book, one to which I have mapped the twists and turns of my own autobiography over the years. Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering. Instead, some forgotten facet of the story comes to light, and the feeling is always that of having blurred past something that was right in front of me.

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This is because “Mrs. Dalloway” is a remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains. In fact, on the surface, it sounds suspiciously dull. The novel depicts a single day in June from the perspective of a number of characters. The year is 1923. The Great War is over, but the memory of its unprecedented destruction still hangs over England. In a posh part of London, a middle-aged woman plans a party. She goes out to get flowers. A man she almost married drops by for a visit. She is snubbed by an acquaintance. She remembers an alluring girl she once kissed. Later, guests pour into her house for the party. In the midst of all this, she hears news of a stranger’s violent death. In between these modest plot points, Clarissa Dalloway wanders around London, lies down for a rest, and takes note of Big Ben striking out the hours again and again.

But, wait, I am leaving out everything. Let me go back to the beginning.

The first time I read Virginia Woolf, it was for extraliterary reasons. I knew she had gone mad. I wanted to know how, exactly. Some dark wing was crossing over me that fall. The middle register of experience had abruptly fallen away. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, it seemed. My brain buzzed and whirred in terrifying ways. Everything seemed connected to everything else, but in ways I didn’t dare try to explain. I was seventeen, I think, eighteen maybe. I worked an early shift at a bakery, and I’d ride there on my bike before dawn, the whoosh of the darkness soft and creaturely around me. Why are you crying for no reason? I’d think, brushing my hands across my face.

I suspected I should tell someone about the buzzing and the whirring and the crying, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Instead, I went to the university library one night and checked out books I thought might contain clues about what was in store for me. “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of them. Before I sat down to read it properly, I opened it at random, and this sentence was given occultly to me: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

I could feel my loneliness recede slightly as I read the words.

I backtracked to the first introduction of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked soldier, loosely tethered to the world, into whom Woolf had poured many of her own experiences of madness. In the first scene, he is standing on the same street as Mrs. Dalloway. They do not know each other (they will never meet), but, in this one moment, they are briefly connected, both startled by the sound of a car backfiring. Here is our first glimpse of him:

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? Yes, this. Exactly this, I thought. I started the book over from the beginning and found that the darkness gathering around Septimus was woven into other narrative threads, ones I was less interested in. All these old people talking about houses and parties and hats—what did they have to do with me? I skimmed over these other stories, noting here and there the stunning beauty of the language, then raced ahead to find more Septimus sections. His thoughts, blazingly sad, seemed beautiful to me. I wrapped myself in an old blanket and read through the night, hoping it wouldn’t end badly for him.

I didn’t return to “Mrs. Dalloway” again until I was in my thirties, when I was on a different kind of quest. I was a wife and the mother of a young child, and, after years of living alone, I found myself suddenly, startlingly mired in the domestic. My days at home with my daughter were full of emotion yet anecdote-less. I wanted to write a novel about this feeling, which was one of want amid plenty, but I worried it would not make a good book, that it would be too trivial. I’d had an idea before my daughter was born that I would keep a diary during the early years. I imagined it structured like a kind of ledger. On one side it would read “In the House” and, on the other, “In the World.”

A poet friend of mine had stamps made up with these phrases imprinted on them and gave them to me just after my daughter was born. But after only a month, I abandoned the idea. I hated to see the blank space where my impressions of life in the world should have been. It was February, blizzarding, and I stayed shut inside most days with the baby. But still I kept wondering how to do it, how to tear down this screen between House and World. What would a philosophical novel set in a domestic sphere look like? Stupidly, I did not think of “Mrs. Dalloway,” which I remembered narrowly as a book about madness. But then, one day, I reread Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels,” from 1919. It is a manifesto of sorts, and I found it spoke directly to me. (Six years later, she would put many of these ideas into play when she wrote “Mrs. Dalloway.”)

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

I loved this idea of recording the atoms as they fell, of registering each one, however small a moment it appeared to be. Woolf’s insight seemed sneakily mystical to me. Many mystic traditions teach that the distinctions between the mundane and the sublime are more porous than we imagine: if one is truly awake, these differences cease to be apparent.

Once I started noticing this idea, I found traces of this collapsing of scale throughout the modernist canon. Robert Walser wrote about how Cézanne’s genius lay in “placing in the same ‘temple’ things both large and small.” And Picasso said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things.”

But it was in “Mrs. Dalloway” that this radical levelling of high and low found its most thrilling expression for me. I returned to it as a model for the domestic novel that I hoped to write. Woolf’s brilliant soaring sentences were a far cry from my modest, pared-down ones, but the leaps in consciousness, the insistence on the importance of the half-seen, of the subterranean feeling, of the quicksilver joys and sorrows of domestic life was a revelation. This time around, I cared less for Septimus and his grand soliloquies about human nature and death. I knew his story moved deathward at a mighty clip. Instead, I was hungry for signs of life. This time, I lingered over Clarissa’s delight in the incidental things that crossed her path: the laughing girls taking their “absurd woolly dogs” for a run; the aging dowagers in motorcars off on “errands of mystery”; and, on the pond, “the slow-swimming happy ducks.” This time, I was interested in the old people talking about houses and parties (though the hats still left me cold). I started to ask myself, as I pushed my daughter on a swing or bought pork chops or counted out change at the bodega, Wait, what is the exact nature of this moment? Or, in short, What would Virginia Woolf do?

And now, fifteen years later, I find myself wandering through the emotional landscape of this novel again. The novelty is that I am nearly the same age as Mrs. Dalloway, who has “just broken into her fifty-second year.” I find myself marvelling less over the sweeping insights of the novel and more over the intricate delights of its language and form. I keep thinking about the shocking velocity of Woolf’s sentences, how they rocket off into the sky, trailing sparks of emotion behind them. I keep thinking about how beautifully, how gracefully, how ecstatically, even, she makes use of dashes and commas and parentheses to capture the halting stutter-step of feeling being transmuted into thought. But there are still, of course, the uneasier pleasures of reading some biting insight on the page and wondering if it applies to me.

This time, I am pricked by the passage in which Clarissa’s old flame, Peter Walsh, describes how getting older has changed him. He talks about how it is a relief to retreat from the obsessiveness of his youthful passions:

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal.

So much less personal! I will be fifty-two this year, and this phrase needles me. Perhaps this is because I, like Clarissa, have never been good at detachment. I once found my own relationship to entanglements succinctly described in two lines of a Gary Lutz short story. “Are you involved with anyone?” a character is asked. “Everybody,” he answers. To become less personal strikes me as a terrible fate, though Peter Walsh speaks of it calmly, as if it is a pleasant thing. But how could it be pleasant to withdraw from this blooming, buzzing world of people? Woolf seems to imply that this desire for distance grows gradually, almost imperceptibly, as you get older—until, one day, you find yourself noticing the petals of the flowers instead of the person holding the bouquet. I’d like to think she’s wrong about this, that for once her insights do not apply to me. (Then I remember how one paragraph ago I was lingering not on the vivid characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” but on the suppleness of its dashes, the beauty of its commas, the grace of its parentheses.)

This essay was drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “ Mrs. Dalloway ,” which is out in January, from Penguin Classics .

2020 in Review

• The top twenty-five New Yorker stories .

Place, Space, and Time in Mrs. Dalloway

• Alivia Ragsdale Sam Houston State University
• Dr. Tracy Bilsing

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s post-WWI Modernist novel, uses the philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of time as a lens to explore the human condition innovatively and excitingly by employing Bergson’s psychological time and stream of consciousness. Providing the inner thoughts of individuals during a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf plays with linearity and chronological time as a way to explore how characters’ memories of the past shape their present identities as they all wrestle with the finite mortality they share. Employing both Bergson’s psychological time and the literary device, stream of consciousness, Woolf unveils the characters’ past and present thoughts and emotions in real time (often how the human brain works naturally), providing a unique and innovative perspective on the impact of time on her characters’ lives during a period of global mourning and psychological exploration.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Mrs. Dalloway — Mrs. Dalloway: The Self-characterization and Introspection of Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway: The Self-characterization and Introspection of Virginia Woolf

• Categories: Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf

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Works Cited

• Woolf, Virginia S. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1981
• "What is Bipolar Disorder?" About.com. 2005. About by Yahoo!. 23 April 2005 < http://bipolar.about.com/cs/bpbasics/a/0210_whatisbp.htm>
• Peterson, Cameron. "ClassicNotes: About Mrs. Dalloway" GradeSaver.com. 4 July 2001. GradeSaver. 23 April 2005 <http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/dalloway/about.html>.
• Bloom, Harold. "Virginia Woolf Chronology" VWW.com. 2005. Virginia Woolf Web. 23 April 2005 <http://orlando.jp.org/VWWARC/vwlife.html>
• Ingram, Malcom. "Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History" Ourworld.com. March 2005. Malcom Ingram's Homepage. 23 April 2005 < http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/malcolmi/VWFRAME.HTM>
• Peterson, Cameron. "About Virginia Woolf." GradeSaver.com. 4 July 2001. GradeSaver. 24 April 2005 < http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_virginia_woolf.html>.
• Grohol, John M. "Virginia Woolf." Psychcentral.com. 2005. Psych Central. 24 April 2005 < http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Virginia_Woolf>

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Woolf, Virginia. 'Mrs. Dalloway.' Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.Beers, David. 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Feminist Reading.' Inquiries Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012.Whitworth, Michael H. 'Reading Modernist Fiction.' [...]

Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" is a complex and intricate work that delves into the thoughts and emotions of its characters as they navigate through a day in their lives. The ending of the novel is particularly poignant, [...]

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Inc., 1925.Bradshaw, David. “Between Things: The Fragment as Form in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 56, no. 1, 2010, pp. 70-97. JSTOR, [...]

Black, N. (2004). Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca, USA: Cornell University Press.Blackstone, B. (1969). Virginia Woolf. Essex, United Kingdom: Longmans/Green & Co.Bowlby, R. (1992). Virginia Woolf. London, United Kingdom: [...]

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway uses themes that scrutinize the environment of interwar England, which inhibited the ability to effectively communicate one’s thoughts and feelings, because the cultural norm dismissed [...]

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway criticizes societal conventions as it portrays the internal thoughts of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and the various characters that surround her in post-World War I London. Woolf [...]

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Mrs. Dalloway

By virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway study guide.

In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway , Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side." However, even the theme that would lead Woolf to create a double for Clarissa Dalloway can be viewed as a progression of other similar ideas cultivated in Jacob's Room. Woolf's next novel, then, was a natural development from Jacob's Room, as well as an expansion of the short stories she wrote before deciding to make Mrs. Dalloway into a full novel.

The Dalloways had been introduced in the novel, The Voyage Out , but Woolf presented the couple in a harsher light than she did in later years. Richard is domineering and pompous. Clarissa is dependent and superficial. Some of these qualities remain in the characters of Mrs. Dalloway but the two generally appear much more reasonable and likeable. Clarissa was modeled after a friend of Woolf's named Kitty Maxse, whom Woolf thought to be a superficial socialite. Though she wanted to comment upon the displeasing social system, Woolf found it difficult at times to respond to a character like Clarissa. She discovered a greater amount of depth to the character of Clarissa Dalloway in a series of short stories, the first of which was titled, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," published in 1923. The story would serve as an experimental first chapter to Mrs. Dalloway. A great number of similar short stories followed and soon the novel became inevitable. As critic Hermione Lee details, "On 14 October 1922 [Woolf] recorded that 'Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book,' but it was sometime before [Woolf] could find the necessary balance between 'design and substance.'"

Within the next couple years, Woolf became inspired by a 'tunneling' writing process, allowing her to dig 'caves' behind her characters and explore their souls. As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is "precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the 'formal railway line of sentence' and to show how people 'feel or think or dream...all over the place.'" In order to give Clarissa more substance, Woolf created Clarissa's memories. Woolf used characters from her own past in addition to Kitty Maxse, such as Madge Symonds, on whom she based Sally Seton. Woolf held a similar type of affectionate devotion for Madge at the age of fifteen as a young Clarissa held for Sally.

The theme of insanity was close to Woolf's past and present. She originally planned to have Clarissa die or commit suicide at the end of the novel but finally decided that she did want this manner of closure for Clarissa. As critic Manly Johnson elaborates, "The original intention to have Clarissa kill herself 'in the pattern of Woolf's own intermittent despair' was rejected in favor of a 'dark double' who would take that act upon himself. Creating Septimus Smith led directly to Clarissa's mystical theory of vicarious death and shared existence, saving the novel from a damaging balance on the side of darkness." Still, the disassociation of crippling insanity from the character of Clarissa Dalloway did not completely save Woolf from the pain of recollection. Woolf's husband and close friends compared her periods of insanity to a manic depression quite similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus. Woolf also included frustratingly impersonal doctor types in Bradshaw and Holmes that reflected doctors she had visited throughout the years.

As the novel focused mainly on the character of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf changed the name of the novel to Mrs. Dalloway from its more abstract working title, The Hours , before publishing it. Woolf struggled to combine many elements that impinged on her sensibility as she wrote the novel. The title, Mrs. Dalloway, best suited her attempts to join them together. As Woolf commented, "In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Furthermore, she hoped to respond to the stagnant state of the novel, with a consciously 'modern' novel. Many critics believe she succeeded. The novel was published in 1925, and received much acclaim.

Mrs. Dalloway Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Mrs. Dalloway is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Compare the journey of Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus?

The heroine of the novel, Clarissa is analyzed in terms of her life, personality, and thought process throughout the book by the author and other characters. She is viewed from many angles. Clarissa enjoys the moment-to-moment aspect of life and...

Theme of love in Mrs.dalloway

I think that relationships are theme which includes love. Relationships are addressed in many different ways in the story. First is the relationship between Clarissa and Richard Dalloway. The marriage seems solid and the couple complements one...

what do flowers represent in Mrs.Dalloway?

Flowers primarily represent the joy and beauty of life, especially for Mrs. Dalloway. Flowers provide an extended metaphor for beauty and femininity. Consider Sally's rather rough handling as an attack on her beauty and her femininity.

Study Guide for Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway study guide contains a biography of Virginia Woolf, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Mrs. Dalloway
• Mrs. Dalloway Summary
• Character List
• Part I, Sections 1-3 Summary and Analysis

Essays for Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Mrs. Dalloway.

• Mrs. Dalloway: Body and Room as Box of Flowers and Health
• More Than A Woman
• Superficiality in Mrs. Dalloway
• The Changing Society of Mrs. Dalloway
• Thoughts on the Triangle of Author, Reader, and Character in Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway'.

Lesson Plan for Mrs. Dalloway

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Mrs. Dalloway Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Mrs. Dalloway

• Introduction

Mrs. Dalloway

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Pages 130-182

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Further Reading & Resources

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Mrs. Dalloway , one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novels, was published in 1925. The entirety of the novel takes place over the course of one day in London, in June of 1923. At the start of the novel, in the morning, Clarissa Dalloway , the protagonist , makes last-minute preparations for her party scheduled for that evening. As the day progresses, readers meet various characters, major and minor, and learn about their thoughts and feelings about the past, present and future. The novel finishes late that night at the Dalloway residence, at Clarissa’s party. Throughout the novel, tragic and desolate discussions of mental health and loneliness weave in and out of quotidian concerns like buying flowers and repairing torn clothes; in Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf somehow makes these seemingly-incompatible topics perfectly sensible and poignant.

From an early age, Virginia Woolf enjoyed a life of the mind. Her father, Leslie Stephen, an author, critic, and biographer, fostered her love of reading as a child. As Woolf became older, she became a steadfast member of the Bloomsbury Group, a precocious set of young artists and intellectuals who gave her the support she needed to become a writer. She married Leonard Woolf, whom she knew from the Bloomsbury Group, and she was devoted to him throughout their life together, though many scholars describe Woolf’s extramarital affair with poet Vita Sackville-West as her greatest love affair. Woolf’s own knowledge of how it feels to be attracted to women, and her understanding of the futility of such feelings, are identifiable in Mrs. Dalloway , in the friendship between Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton .

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Woolf’s choice to depict and describe in detail the experience of one character’s descent into a mental health crisis is also noteworthy. This character, a veteran of World War I, suffers from shell-shock, but his doctors are unable to comprehend the depth of his suffering. Woolf presents his situation with veracity as she herself suffered from what would today be diagnosed as a kind of bipolar disorder. From an early age, Woolf experienced breakdowns and bouts of depression that eventually led to her suicide by drowning at the age of 59 in 1941, just at the start of World War II. Woolf’s own acute understanding of insecurity, anxiety and other human frailties is reflected in her precise and sensitive rendering of her characters.

Scholars widely consider Mrs. Dalloway to be a landmark work of the Modernist movement thanks to Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, as well as her choice to focus the content of the novel on the interior lives of her characters. Woolf rejected realist approaches in her writing, approaches that were popularized in the Edwardian age preceding World War I; she chose instead to depict the lives of her characters in a deeper, more psychologically and emotionally sensitive way. Woolf incorporates techniques contemporary readers will recognize as characteristic of film productions; for example, flashbacks illuminate memories while scenes pan from one character’s perspective to another’s and montages compress time into brief but informative moments. Woolf had been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses , another paragon of Modernist prose , when she began writing Mrs. Dalloway; Ulysses is a novel set on one day in Dublin in 1904.

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Mrs. dalloway, the virginia woolf library authorized edition.

On Sale: September 24, 1990

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The authorized, original edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece and one of the most “moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century” (Michael Cunningham), with a foreword by Maureen Howard. 

In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it. 

“Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster

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