Better the second time around

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	• Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf Harcourt, 2002 - 216 pages average customer review:based on 152 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Better the second time around

This was the first Woolf novel that I read and i am glad that it was. I was a college freshman who had just seen The Hours. I was immediately drawn to this author. After reading it the first time, it is possible to know what the basic story is about: a woman giving a party and wondering about the choices she has made in the past. But each reading helps bring out so many details that are easy to miss. People may claim this is a hard read, but Mrs. Woolf's books were NEVER meant to be read quickly. The word usage and details are so precise that is should be read slowly to appreciate it more. A great book to start getting into Woolf.

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Woolf in Her Prime

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was a well known writer, critic, feminist, and publisher. This was her fourth novel.

I read her first novel "The Voyage Out" before buying the present book, then skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop - then read "Jacob's Room," her third, then "Mrs. Dalloway," her fourth, and then "To The Lighthouse."

"The Voyage Out" is simple and straightforward work and it might remind the reader of a Jane Austen novel, but it set on a ship and then at a remote location. It is over 400 pages long, and has an Austen theme. After her second novel - which did not do very well - Woolf decided to be more risky and creative with the next book. She changed her style and approach to the novel and Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique to bring a sense of the chaos and shortness of a young man's life around the time of World War I, Jacob's life, i.e.: from the pandemonium of Jacob's life as portrayed by Woolf through the use of the stream of the consciousness technique, we eventually have clarity in the novel. She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story in the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."

She carries this writing style on into the similarly chaotic story "Mrs. Dalloway." Mrs. Dalloway, or simply Clarrisa Dalloway the character, was used in her first novel "The Voyage Out" but only as a minor character who the protagonist, Rachel, meets on a sea voyage. Mr. Dalloway makes a pass at Rachel and kisses her. Woolf brings them back in force here with their own novel.

The present story is set in the summer in post WWI London and it revolves around a few days in the life of Mrs. Dalloway. She has a party and during that period an old suitor, Peter Walsh, makes his return appearance from an overseas job posting in India, and does so after thirty years. Part of the story involves her thoughts about that relationship and her life choices. The second plot element is mental illness and the appearance of Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia. He is a war survivor but is suffering from depression. The third element is her present husband and his love for her.

The compressed in time and chaotic story which involves Clarrisa, her husband, Peter Walsh, and Septimus, lends itself to the stream of consciousness technique. Some make comparisons with Joyce and his stream of consciousness novel "Ulysses." In any case, Woolf uses it to advantage here. Finally, Woolf is an author who promoted aesthetic purity in fiction. But here she uses the novel as a chance to attack the care for the mental illnesses.

This is an excellent novel written by Woolf at her prime. Her approach lends itself to the subject and it is quite effective. If you want to read a conventional novel by Woolf, then I recommend her first novel, "The Voyage Out."

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An expanding web

This is a spellweaver of a book, slipping lucidly from minute to minute over the course of a perfect London summer's day, its gossamer threads forming an expanding web as complex and interconnected as a symphony. I came to it after reading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, written two years later (1925 and 1927). Both books are set in summer, and both are confined to a single physical setting. But whereas the house and garden in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, nominally in Scotland, might almost be anywhere, London is a real and precise presence in MRS DALLOWAY, lovingly described over a range of several miles. The later book, though concentrating on two specific days, has a span of almost a decade; MRS DALLOWAY follows the classical unity of time, starting in the early morning and continuing until night in a single unbroken span (a precedent perhaps imitated by Ian McEwan in his SATURDAY). Conversely, while TO THE LIGHTHOUSE confines itself to about a dozen characters, MRS DALLOWAY moves in ever-expanding ripples, adding more and more people as guests arrive for Clarissa Dalloway's party in the book's concluding scene.

The hours of the day are marked by the sound of Big Ben: "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air." The image of expanding and dissipating circles is central; as in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Woolf is preoccupied with the passage of time; both books are a memento mori. But neither one is grim; there is a summer freshness here, a feeling for the charm of society life in a great city, that fits the preliminary musical chimes of the great clock -- but the irrevocable toll of time is not forgotten. We see Clarissa Dalloway, a little over fifty, wife of a respected politician with an assured place in society. Like the sound of the clock, like ripples on the water, her circles have also expanded since her marriage, but have they also dissipated, dissolved in the air? Near the beginning of the book, she is visited by Peter Walsh, a former suitor whom she refused some thirty years before, now back home after many years in India. Both of them have changed, but the memories take her back and force her to weigh and reweigh her concepts of success and happiness.

All the characters in the novel are known personally to Clarissa Dalloway, with the exception of only two: Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia, whose story, weaving in and out of the main one, takes up about a fifth of the whole. Septimus, a clerk by profession but something of a poet and aesthete, has returned from the war unable to feel. When his best friend is killed in the last days of the war, he congratulates himself on surviving without cracking up, but soon begins to recognize his lack of emotion for the curse that it is; he married Lucrezia largely in an attempt to overcome this. He must be one of the first victims of shell-shock to appear in literature (but not the last: see Pat Barker's magnificent REGENERATION and all of Jacqueline Winspear's MAISIE DOBBS series). Virtually everything in Woolf's mature novels is connected primarily by thought rather than through action, but this takes the principle even farther, linking Septimus to Clarissa in theme only, as her Doppelgänger; the author admitted as much in a later preface. In some ways they are opposites: Clarissa so full of life, a society hostess married to an establishment figure; and Septimus, potentially suicidal (like Woolf herself), a provincial nobody married to the daughter of a foreign innkeeper. And yet, for all his inability to feel, there is an immediacy to the scenes between Septimus and Lucrezia, whose lives are played out in emotional primary colors, whereas Clarissa's world, for all its brilliance, is in iridescent shimmers and half-tones.

And what of Mr. Richard Dalloway, MP? We see surprisingly little of him, but what we do see only emphasizes the theme of lost feeling that runs through the book. Something makes him realize that it has been years since he has told his wife of his love. So he buys a great bunch of flowers and we see him "walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." The phrase is repeated again and again. When he does get home, the scene does not go quite like that, but it is a touching one all the same. For Richard is one of those Englishmen who can only show their feelings obliquely. Poor Peter Walsh, on the other hand, who weeps openly and is an emotional wreck, is considered a failure, "not quite the thing." And Clarissa, still precariously aware of both sides of her nature, must steer her way between the two. And we rejoice that she can.

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Clarissa's Day

It is only a single London day in June, 1923, after World War I, and Mrs. Dalloway is out shopping for flowers for her big party to be given that evening. Even the Prime Minister will be coming because Clarissa Dalloway's husband, Richard, is a minor cog in the government. Virginia Woolf was originally going to call her breakthrough novel The Hours, a title Michael Cunningham used in his tribute novel to Mrs. Dalloway. The pealing of Big Ben and other chimes striking the hours segue this chapterless novel into different character spheres, different memories or thoughts. Big Ben's leaden circles of sound move out, widen, and wrap other characters into the narrative.
Using James Joyce's then-new technique of stream of consciousness, Woolf explores the minds of a number of her characters. Clarissa's character is probed in great detail, not only as she sees herself but also as many other characters see her.
Septimus Smith is wandering around London that June day, a veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, what was then called being shell-shocked. Though they pass close by each other, Septimus and Clarissa never meet. When she hears word of this stranger's suicide through a famous doctor at the party, it has a profound effect upon her. Septimus is probably closer in his mental state to Virginia Woolf herself than to Clarissa Dalloway, but the ripples of meaning, like the reverberations of the chiming, caused by his death make her neglect her party. Clarissa, who seemed so unfeeling and superficial, turns out to have too much feeling.
This is not easy reading. Woolf wrote many essays and portions of this book are more essayistic than fictional narrative.
The story has a fluidity as one character's life and mind blends and segues into another. One character after another takes center stage in the narrative. Peter Walsh, Clarissa's old beau, passes Septimus in Regents Park, and the narrative passes from Septimus to Peter in the way that a baton would be passed in a relay race.
In the party scene I was reminded of Joyce's "The Dead" in Dubliners. Mrs. Dalloway is a richly textured book that can be reread many times. At different stages of the reader's life it will take on new meanings. Clarissa Dalloway is like a chameleon that you can never truly pin down.

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Woolf' Best

For the longest time, I thought I disliked Virginia Woolf's work. Typically, I am not a fan of "stream of consciousness," and being that "To the Lighthouse" was my first read, Woolf left me not wanting for more. However, in a Queer Theory course in my graduate studies, "Mrs. Dalloway" was assigned and I absolutely loved it. In fact, upon finishing this work, I ordered all of Woolf's works.
Not only is the work hauntingly beautiful and melancholy, but also rather daring. The book takes place in the course of one day in London, yet somehow, the reader becomes familiar with lifetimes of relationships, some of them homosexual relationships. Woolf's work here is gorgeously poetic.
The book generated a lot of discussion because it has so much to offer to many different kinds of readers. I once swore I would never read Woolf again, but this book has made me recant the error of my ways.
If you are a fan of poetic prose, read this book. I intend to read it again and again.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. 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.

"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since.
"Mrs. Dalloway also contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
--Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

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