Tag Archives: Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway, report 2

Posted on 1 Dec 2025 | 2 comments

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020) from page 103 to end

As I expected, it took me just two months to read Mrs Dalloway three pages a day. If you haven’t read it, I recommend doing it slowly in just this way: three pages at a time seems to be just about perfect.

The book looks for the person behind the public-facing name Mrs Dalloway, to create a kind of literary cubist portrait: beneath the skin of the upper-crust English lady whose life centres on giving parties for the right people are the remains of a glorious, multi-faceted creature who once lived with grace and passion. We see her from many angles, through the eyes of her husband (who barely sees her), her daughter, a resentful working class history teacher, a maid, a man whose proposal of marriage she rejected in spite of their mutual passion, a woman who was also drawn to her when young, an older aristocratic woman of the type played so splendidly by Maggie Smith, and more

In one way the book is about the disappointment of youthful hopes and expectations. For example, Sally Seton, who once ran naked down the corridors of an country mansion, is now Lady something or other with six sons and insists that she is completely happy. Clarissa herself is married to Richard who is at best a mediocre politician. Peter Walsh, her former suitor, has spent most of his life in India, unhappily married and now caught up in an awkward affair. And quite unconnected to Clarissa until the final pages is Septimus Smith, a soldier returned from the trenches of the ‘Great War’ with what we would now call PTSD. He is haunted by the image of a friend who was killed in the War, and in the end (spoiler alert, but the book is a hundred years old after all) kills himself in desperation. When Clarissa learns of his death, she is playing hostess at her party, to which the whole book has been building. Suddenly she is alone and grapples with thoughts of her own mortality.

I came to the book expecting it to be difficult and a bit airy-fairy. Maybe it is both. The English class system is rock solid in its pages, and though Clarissa is criticised as a snob, the basic viewpoint of the novel can’t be entirely absolved of that charge. But I wasn’t prepared for how much pleasure there is in the way the narrative glides among different points of view, for the almost Whitmanesque celebration of city life, for its laugh-out-loud moments, or, in the end, for the pervading sense pathos in a society and individual souls who have survived the momentous events of a World War and a pandemic. I wasn’t prepared for just how much, sentence by sentence and page by page, I enjoyed it.

it’s hard to pluck a passage out of context, but here is a bit I love. Peter Walsh is watching Clarissa as she escorts the Prime Minister from the party:

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she said goodbye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)

Yeah, right! He wasn’t in love!

Maybe I should give To the Lighthouse a go.

I have written this blog post in Gadigal and Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Mrs Dalloway, report 1, and November verse 1

Posted on 2 Nov 2025 | 1 comment

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020)

Since taking nearly two years to read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu six years ago, I’ve had a classic slow-read on the go most of the time. When I’ve embarked on one of these slow-reads I regularly come across mentions of the book elsewhere. It’s like that with my current project, Mrs Dalloway.

This month, a friend sent me a link to Zora Simic’s article in The Conversation, Trauma memoirs can help us understand the unthinkable. They can also be art. Here’s an excerpt:

Of all Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is the one most often read as semi-autobiographical and as a reckoning with unresolved trauma: of England’s in the wake of the first world war, and in the novelist’s own life. <big snip> Woolf has long been a lodestar for writers grappling with trauma – in their lives, and on the page, especially women writers.

Reading the first couple of pages, when upper-class Clarissa Dalloway is out in the early morning shopping for flowers and enjoying the life of the London streets, I couldn’t see much trauma. But then the scene broadens and darkens. By page 103, I’m now reading the book as mainly about aftermaths: Clarissa is recovering from an illness and enduring an unhappy marriage; the War and pandemic are still alive in collective memory; Peter Walsh, freshly returned from a decade in India, is still wounded by having been rejected by Clarissa many years earlier; returned soldier Septimus Smith is wandering London’s streets, hallucinating, suicidal, ‘shell-shocked’ and putting his Italian wife Lucrezia through hell. There’s plenty of trauma to go round.

I’m glad I’m reading this book just a few pages a day. It cries out for sharply focused reading, which I can just about sustain for three pages at a time. Read this way, the book is exhilarating. I had thought it was going to be the stream of consciousness of one upper-class Englishwoman. In fact there’s a whole array of characters, and the narrative voice flits among them. I say ‘flits’ because feels as if the narrator is an elf-like creature (I almost see her as Tinkerbell) who slips in and out of people’s minds, sometimes staying for barely a second, sometimes for several pages. Most of the characters are aristocrats of one sort or another, but not all. Lady Bruton’s maid Milly Brush has definite likes and dislikes as she stands impassively while her mistress entertains three gentlemen for lunch. One of those gentlemen is a bluff middle-class man with pretensions – he knows how to craft a publishable letter to The Times but believes women shouldn’t read Shakespeare for moral reasons. And Richard – Mr Dalloway – makes an appearance, buying flowers for Clarissa and resolving to tell her he loves her (which the reader knows is far too little, far too late). And so on. It’s much more complex, and funnier, than I expected.

Here’s page 78*:

And because it’s November**, here’s a verse drawn from it and the next page:

November Verse 1: Septimus Smith
He might have made a great accountant
but for Shakespeare, Keats and love
that set him scribbling with his fountain
pen all night. 'You need to tough-
en up, play football,' said his mentor.
War changed everything. He went to
fight in France and made a friend,
a cheerful manly friend, whose end
in Italy was sudden, brutal.
Mrs Woolf says War had taught
him not to feel, to set at nought
such loss. Sublime the total
calm he felt. But, come next year,
the sudden thunderclaps of fear.

I have written this blog post near what was once luxuriant wetland, in Gadigal and Wangal country, where I recently saw two rosellas (mulbirrang in Wiradjuri, I don’t know the Gadigal or Wangal name). I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
** Each November I aim to post 14 fourteen line stanzas on this blog (see here for an explanation, though that explanation incorrectly calls my verses sonnets)

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Posted in Books, LoSoRhyMo, slow read

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Beginning Mrs Dalloway

Posted on 3 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020)

I was listening to Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast when he interviewed Merve Emre, editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Ms Emre is from the US, so her book adds a period to the novel’s name). Their enthusiasm for Woolf’s book made me realise it would be ideal one of my slow reads of the classics.

My introduction to the book was Stephen Daldry’s movie The Hours, which is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name and stars Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose. I’ve vaguely wanted to read Mrs Dalloway ever since, but been just as vaguely reluctant because of a general impression that the writing was beautiful but difficult.

So here goes. At three pages a day, it will probably take about two months. I don’t intend to delve into annotations and footnotes. Mercifully the copy I have from the library doesn’t have a learned introduction. Bearing in mind someone’s description of a classic as a work you cannot encounter for the first time, I’ll inevitably bring preconceptions to it, but I’ll try to read it as if it’s just a novel.

At this stage, six pages in, I’m loving it. I’m also glad I’m reading a few pages at a time, because – so far at least – I’d hate to be rushing it.

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