“Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf

This spring marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of “Mrs Dalloway”, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel and one that many consider to be her strongest and one of the most significant English novels of the Twentieth Century. It is clearly influenced by Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ in that it is set on a single day and in a single location – central London – and employs the stream of consciousness approach which Virginia Woolf was to become so associated with, taking us inside her characters’ heads as their thoughts bob about from topic to topic, musing on their pasts, as well as present and future concerns.

It is the kind of book which grows on you with each reading. I have now read it three times now and find that on each occasion I appreciate different aspects. The prose is superb of course, so elegant and precise. I find some of the metaphors irritating though. This was of course 1925, and there were things she could not say if her book was not to be censored

as D H Lawrence’s were. But even so, the continual references to the Peter Walsh character fiddling with his pocket-knife whenever he contemplates the ladies becomes very tedious by the end. By contrast, the passage towards the start in which various people try to de-cypher what a little bi-plane is writing across London’s bright blue skies works superbly as a metaphor for the Age and people’s thinking about it at the time.

The day over which the plot – such as there is one – unfolds is 13th June 1923. This is just a few months before 29th September, when according to Matthew Parker’s excellent ‘One Fine Day’ published a year or two ago, the British Empire was to reach its geographical zenith. The weather is fine and Clarissa Dalloway, conventional upper middle-class wife of a Conservative MP, is planning a big party to be held in the evening.

While she and her party form a major focus of the book, other characters are introduced too, some at greater length than others. All are pottering about London doing and thinking about different things.

The most notable is Septimus Smith, a war veteran who is suffering from the effects of shell shock and is very mentally disturbed. In taking her readers inside his head, Virginia Woolf was being particularly original and was surely drawing heavily on her own experiences of clinical depression.

The contrast of his life with those of the more pleasantly paced other characters gives the novel its grit and depth. The novel is intended to be read as serious social commentary as well as a literary experiment. “I have made up my mind that I am not going to be popular’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the time she started working on “Mrs Dalloway”, ‘I am to write what I like, and they’re to say what they like’.