Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf


I'm in the midst of my year of reading Virginia Woolf. I plan to read all the novels, at least, but it will be hard to resist going back to the letters, the essays, and the journals. Perhaps because I'm focused on Woolf these days, her name seems to come up a lot, and in the last month or so I've encountered a claim that startled me, but does seem defensible: Virginia Woolf was a better critic than she was novelist. In both cases those who spoke this heresy acknowledged that they were being heretical in that slightly irritating "I know I'm being naughty, but . . . " manner, but again, I don't find the claim indefensible. I look forward to going back to the essays to see if any of them, or all of them taken together, could be as wonderful as Mrs Dalloway. 

Someone must have noticed that Mrs Dalloway is one of the great modernist novels of the city—the influence of Joyce's day in Dublin is hard to miss. Mrs Dalloway spends her day, of course, in London but hers is only one of the minds into which we are invited. Woolf moves through the consciousnesses of a variety of Londoners including the upper class if slightly bohemian Clarissa Dalloway, but also the misfit Peter Walsh (who had hoped to marry Clarissa), and the damaged World War I veteran, Septimus Smith. Through this cast we move through the city in all its alluring minutia. Clarissa and Septimus—who never meet—exist as opposite polls of Woolf's London: Clarissa moving lifeward, doing her best to connect with all that she encounters, Septimus moving deathward, obsessed with his friend Evans, a casualty of the war.

Woolf wrote, in a 1919 essay on modern novels:

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.

This is what Woolf's great character, Mrs Dalloway, attempts to do in the pages of this novel: she relishes small things, the atoms that fall. This is what Virginia Woolf does in her astounding account of a day in London. 

It's not fashionable to believe in progress, but moving through Woolf's novels in the order she wrote them, it is clear she does progress: each is better than the one which preceded it.

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