Mrs Dalloway

Written by Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway is a revelatory novel that has time and time again been offered to a variety of audiences in different mediums: a film has been made of the tale starring Maggie Smith and the story gets a modern reworking and restructuring in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was also made into a film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. Although a relatively small novel, Mrs Dalloway is a striking and fantastic piece of literary work that is an integral part of literary history. 

Clarissa Dalloway is throwing a party and although everyone who she comes into contact with over the course of this day believes that she is content and in control, she is not. Troubled by questions of class, love, life, and death, Clarissa Dalloway is not fine at all. On the other side of Regent’s Park sits an unhappy wife and her husband Septimus Warren Smith, a poet and survivor of the World War I. Although doctors say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Septimus, he suffers from visions, internal voices, and bouts of insanity, all of which threaten to lead to a terrible and inevitable end. 

Spanning over the course of one day, Mrs Dalloway is a remarkable novel for a number of reasons. Firstly, despite the book’s lack of length, the writing is very fascinating indeed! The story is a series of monologues from each of the various characters and makes for fascinating reading as each interior monologue gradually reveals the characters of the two central protagonists: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. As well as doing this, the monologues establish a history for each character and also bring a fair amount of the central dramas and complications into the mix: e.g. the love triangle between Clarissa, Peter Walsh, and Sally Seton. Through Woolf’s cunning way of writing, which is actually quite long-winded and very internal, we get to know these characters so very intimately, something that is rare to find in a book that spans just over a hundred pages. 

Secondly, the story deals with some very confronting themes. Set against the backdrop of post-war, modernist, London, Mrs Dalloway is a book that is founded on contradictions of all conceivable types. We have the contradictions between life and death as is depicted by the two protagonists whose stories run parallel with one another over the course of the day. We also have contradictions between men and women, rich and poor, self and other, and love and marriage. I think what made this book quite revelatory in its day was the fact that we see both positive and negative sides to all these themes as well as a little bit of homosexuality. Death in this story is not seen as such a terrible villain that should be feared and avoided, but as a means of an escape from the cruel intentions of life: this is beautifully conveyed through the character of Septimus: suffering from post-war trauma and unable to adapt to this new, modern world. This particular perception of death is also quite strikingly reflective of the author’s views on the subject as Virginia Woolf was dogged with bouts of depression throughout her life and various suicide attempts: she successfully drowned herself in 1941. 

Filled with complex and confronting themes, romance, despair, drama, life, and death. Mrs Dalloway is a remarkable book that, despite it’s short length, does actually prove challenging to read. Once acclimated to the style of Woolf’s writing, then the book is a most memorable day that opens a lot of doors in the mind and may even succeed in changing the reader’s view about certain things.