Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is one of the uncontested classics of modern literature, and stands at the beginning of a dozen years of significant creativity and brilliant experimentation in the novel form explored here and in Woolf’s subsequent novels To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937). Each of these latter novels has its proponents, and no one is surprised to see one or more of them of this or that “Greatest Books” list. But Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s deceptively simple novel about a single day in the life of an upper-class British woman making last-minute preparations for a party she’s hosting that night is more generally acclaimed than any of the others. It is, in fact, on at least 52 “Great Books” lists as numerated on the “Greatest Books of All Time” web page. To name just a fraction of these:
Mrs. Dalloway was included in Time magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923; on the Norwegian Book Clubs/Nobel Committee’s 2002 list of the “100 Best Novels in World Literature”; The Observer’s 2003 list of the “100 Greatest Novels of All Time”; The Guardian’s 2015 list of the “100 Best Novels Written in English”; BBC Radio Oxford’s 2020 list of “100 Books You Must Read Before You Die”; The New York Public Library’s 2020 list of “125 Books We Love for Adults”; The Daily Mail’s 2019 list of “A Hundred Novels to Change Your Life”; the Center for Fiction’s 2021 list of “200 Books that Shaped 200 years of Literature”; and the Encyclopedia Britannica’s very exclusive 2016 list of “12 Novels Considered the Greatest Book Ever Written.” The status of Mrs. Dalloway as a world classic is underscored by the novel’s appearance on the 2006 list “Best Foreign Work of Fiction Chosen by Francophone Writers” published by the French literary magazine Transfuge as well as on radio France’s 2022 list of 20 “Novels that Changed the World”; the Spanish magazine El Pais’ 2008 list of “Favorite Books of 100 Spanish Authors”; its appearance as number 17 on the 1999 list of “The 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century” by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo; and as number 42 on Denmark publisher Gyldendal’s 2024 list of “50 Classics You Must Read Before You Die.” On other major numbered lists, you can find Mrs. Dalloway at number 80 on Penguin Publishing’s 2022 list of “100 Must-Read Classics as chosen by Our Readers”; 46 on Radcliffe Publishing’s 1998 “100 Best Novels” list; 29 on Good Housekeeping’s “100 Best Books to Read by Women Authors”; 11 on Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 “Top 100 Novels”; 10 on The London Times’ 2022 “The 50 Best Books of the Past 100 Years”; 9 on the Telegraph’s 2009 “100 Novels Everyone Should Read”; and as number 3 on the BBC’s 2015 list of “The 100 Greatest British Novels.”
You might have noticed that several of these “Great Books” lists were compiled in or around 2022. This is no coincidence, since 2022 marks the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work that revolutionized the writing of fiction. These lists, recognizing the profound influence of that text, examine the books produced in the century-long wake of that novel’s appearance. Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway about the time she was reading Joyce’s novel, and the effect of Ulysses on Woolf’s narrative perspective is profound, though Woolf is hardly an uncritical follower in that wake. Like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway uses stream-of-consciousness as it follows two characters around London on a single day (believed to be June 13, 1923). But Woolf didn’t acknowledge any direct influence, saying in 1928 that the structure of the novel came to her “without any conscious direction.” It is certainly possible that there was an unconsciousinfluence from the direction of Ulysses, particularly in the experimentation with stream of consciousness, which Woolf almost certainly saw as a revolt against the linear, logically coherent narrative style of the previous century—a style wildly inappropriate in the wake of the technologically enhanced barbarism of the society that brought you the Great War. Life in this post-war environment is reflected in that use of stream-of-consciousness—employing a kind of psychological reality suggested in the newly influential theories of Sigmund Freud. Woolf did give Joyce some credit. In her essay “Modern Fiction,” published the same year as Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote of Ulysses that “on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece.” In her private writings, however, she mentions her difficulties with the text:
Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious.…. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board schoolboy…so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease…
In short, she appreciates Joyce’s innovative style, but feels he does too much that is showy rather than substantive. In her text, nothing is extravagant. It is nuanced, delving into the minds of its characters to present as psychologically realistic a sense of their inner being as language can possibly do.
The books is virtually plotless. It takes its conflicts from past memories of the characters as they go through a single day, particularly Clarissa Dalloway. She is a 51-year old upper-class Englishwoman and wife of a Tory Member of Parliament, and in the novel prepares for, and then hosts, a party at her home. The reader alternates between her mundane preparations and her thoughts and the memories of her past that come into her mind as she interacts with current and former friends. Given access to her private thoughts, the reader can see her alternate between a kind of giddy delight and moments of profound sorrow. Some critics have seen these fluctuations as indicators of a suppressed depression. Indeed, we learn late in the novel that Clarissa has been to see a certain famous psychiatrist, Dr. William Bradshaw, for her depression.
The novel opens with pleasant weather, and as Clarissa starts her London errands the weather reminds her of her youth in Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucester, and this leads her to consider—certainly not for the first time—whether she made the right choice of a husband in the reliable but boring Richard Dalloway rather than the more energetic and stormy Peter Walsh, who had left for India after her rejection. On this particular day, though, she runs into Peter himself, who, though involved with a woman named Daisy in India and currently married to someone else, is clearly still in love with Clarissa. Clarissa also revisits her memories of Sally Seton, her close friend—a feisty tomboy of a girl with whom Clarissa had once shared an unforgettable kiss:
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally.
But Clarissa had chosen the safe way—the marriage to Richard. Sally, now Lady Rosseter with five boys of her own, happens to be in town and shows up at Clarissa’s party, having become disappointingly conventional with age.
Clarissa’s consciousness also turns to more sobering thoughts about the inevitability of death and whether life means anything at all. “It might be possible,” she thinks at one point, “that the world itself is without meaning.” And going on,
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
One of the novel’s themes is the inescapable nature of time—underscored by the constant remembrance of things past in the characters’ minds as well as this inevitability of death and the meaning of life in the face of it: the novel gives us no definitive answer to this overwhelming question, but we are told that Clarissa, known in London society as the perfect hostess, “is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
Mental illness is another of the novel’s significant themes, with Woolf (drawing in part on her own experiences with bipolar disorder) exposing her society’s appalling misunderstanding and mistreatment of the disease. Indeed one of the purposes, and the advantages, of Woolf’s employment of stream-of-consciousness is its revelation of how one’s mental state can be so completely misunderstood by those observing only one’s exterior form. Certainly this is the case with Clarissa’s interactions with people. But this is most clearly delineated in Woolf’s other major character, Septimus Warren Smith (who serves the function of a literary double and foil of Clarissa). Septimus, a veteran of the Great War, is suffering from what at the time was termed “shell shock,” but more accurately called “post traumatic stress disorder” when finally recognized by psychologists dealing with soldiers after Viet Nam. In prior decades, such conditions were often suspected cases of cowardice, as evinced by General Patton’s infamous violent slapping of a soldier under his command suffering “battle fatigue”—the World War II equivalent of “shell shock.” In Septimus’ case, no one—least of all the doctors who diagnose him—has any real understanding of his condition. His Italian wife is confused and sees him as cooling in his affections toward her. His first doctor, Dr. Holmes, having examined him physically, tells Septimus “there was nothing whatever the matter with him,” and advises him that talking of suicide is bound to give his wife “a very odd idea of English husbands,” so it would surely “be better to do something instead of lying in bed.” Referred to the more eminent Dr. Bradshaw—Clarissa’s own analyst (and the only point at which Woolf’s two protagonists intercept)—Septimus is told that he needs a “rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed,” and Bradshaw commits him to a psychiatric hospital. Only the reader sees into Septimus’s true thoughts, his hallucinations, his constant return to thoughts of his fallen comrade Evans, for whom (like Clarissa with Sally) he seems to have unresolved sexual issues.
In the end, Septimus, horrified by the idea of confinement in a hospital, kills himself by jumping out a window. Not really a spoiler, by the way, since, first, any reader worth his salt will know this is coming before the halfway point of the novel; and second, because the book is not about plot but character. Dr. Bradshaw’s wife brings Clarissa’s party down by reporting how this young man had killed himself that afternoon—and Clarissa’s reactions to this (physical and psychological) are, I suppose, the true outcome of the novel, and I won’t spoil those for you.
Woolf’s original plan for the novel which she had tentatively titled “The Hours,” included Mrs. Dalloway dying by suicide during he own party, and did not include the character of Septimus. The most effective adaptation of the novel has been Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, called The Hours: it has three parallel plots, going through a single day in the lives of three women: Woolf herself writing the novel in 1923, a housewife reading the book in 1949, and an editor named Clarissa in 1999 planning a party for a former lover who is dying from AIDS. The 2002 film of this novel, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, is definitely worth seeing as a commentary on Woolf’s novel itself—and a better one than the actual film of Mrs. Dalloway made in 1997, which was not well received. How can a film recreate the inner lives of the characters as revealed in stream-of-consciousness? Read the book. Perhaps read The Hours and watch that movie afterward.