Mrs. Dalloway

Summary

Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. On the way her mind moves back thirty years to summers at Bourton, her family's country house, where she refused the passionate, critical Peter Walsh and chose the steadier Richard, and where she loved the daring Sally Seton, whose kiss on the terrace she still counts the happiest moment of her life. A motor car backfires in Bond Street and an aeroplane writes letters of smoke over the city, and through these shared sights the narration passes from mind to mind until it reaches Septimus Warren Smith, a young clerk who volunteered early in the war, saw his officer and friend Evans killed in Italy just before the Armistice, and now hears voices, believes the birds sing in Greek and that the dead speak to him. His Italian wife Lucrezia, a hat-maker he married in Milan, sits with him in Regent's Park, frightened and lonely. Peter Walsh, back from five years in India and in love with a married woman, calls on Clarissa unannounced, weeps, leaves before he can say what he means, walks through London, falls asleep in the park and passes the Smiths without knowing them. At noon by Big Ben the Smiths see the eminent nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw in Harley Street, who after a short interview decides that Septimus must be sent to a rest home in the country, away from his wife. Richard lunches with the formidable Lady Bruton and the courtier Hugh Whitbread, then carries roses home meaning to tell Clarissa he loves her and cannot say it. Their daughter Elizabeth goes shopping with her history tutor Miss Doris Kilman, a poor and embittered evangelical whom Clarissa resents, then escapes her to ride an omnibus up the Strand. In the late afternoon Septimus and Rezia share a happy hour trimming a hat; when the general practitioner Dr. Holmes comes up the stairs to take him away, Septimus throws himself from the lodging-house window onto the area railings. Peter hears the ambulance pass. At the party, attended by the Prime Minister, by Sally (now Lady Rosseter, mother of five sons near Manchester) and by Peter, the Bradshaws mention the young man's suicide. Clarissa withdraws to a small room, watches an old woman across the way go to bed, feels herself strangely akin to the stranger who has died, and returns to her guests, where Peter, waiting, feels her presence as an ecstasy. Woolf grew the book from her story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923) under the working title The Hours; the Hogarth Press published it in London and Harcourt, Brace in New York in 1925.

Plot or Argument

• Morning: flowers and Bond Street

  Clarissa sets out across St. James's Park, meets Hugh Whitbread, remembers Bourton and Peter's rebukes, looks into Hatchards' window at the dirge from Cymbeline, and buys sweet peas at Mulberry's. A motor car with drawn blinds stalls in Bond Street and the crowd wonders whether the Queen or the Prime Minister is inside.

• The aeroplane and Regent's Park

  A skywriting aeroplane advertises toffee to Londoners who read its letters differently. In Regent's Park Septimus, under Dr. Holmes's orders to notice outside things, sees Evans behind the railings and hears messages, while Rezia longs for Milan.

• Clarissa at home and Peter's visit

  Clarissa learns that Lady Bruton has asked Richard to lunch without her, goes up to her narrow attic bed, remembers Sally Seton, and mends her green dress. Peter Walsh bursts in, opens and shuts his pocket-knife, tells her he is in love with a Major's wife in India, weeps, and is interrupted by Elizabeth.

• Peter's walk and dream

  Peter follows a young woman through Trafalgar Square, sleeps on a bench in Regent's Park beside a nurse and a baby, dreams of a solitary traveller, and remembers the summer Clarissa refused him and the day she met Richard. He sees the Smiths quarrelling and takes them for lovers.

• Septimus's history and Harley Street

  The narrative tells Septimus's past: Stroud, London, Miss Isabel Pole's lectures on Shakespeare, the war, Evans's death, the engagement in Milan, the numbness, Dr. Holmes's visits. At twelve the Smiths see Sir William Bradshaw, and the narrator turns on his creed of proportion and its sister, conversion.

• Lunch, roses and Miss Kilman

  Lady Bruton enlists Hugh to draft her letter to the Times on emigration; Richard buys roses and holds Clarissa's hand without speaking his love. Miss Kilman, praying and eating cakes at the Army and Navy Stores, fails to hold Elizabeth, who rides an omnibus up the Strand and dreams of a profession.

• The hat and the window

  Septimus and Rezia laugh over a hat for Mrs. Peters, and he is for a moment at peace. Holmes arrives; Septimus jumps from the window rather than be taken. Peter, on his way to dress, hears the ambulance and then reads his letters at his hotel.

• The party

  The guests arrive: Ellie Henderson, the Prime Minister, Lady Bruton, old Aunt Helena Parry, Sally and Peter. The Bradshaws bring the news of the suicide; Clarissa goes apart, thinks of the young man and of death, watches the old lady opposite put out her light, and returns. Sally and Peter talk of the past until Peter sees Clarissa coming toward him.

Characters

• Clarissa Dalloway, protagonist

  A London hostess of fifty-one, recovering from illness, who gives a party on the day of the novel and reconsiders her life.

• Septimus Warren Smith, protagonist (double)

  A former clerk and war volunteer of about thirty, gravely disturbed since the death of his officer Evans.

• Lucrezia (Rezia) Warren Smith, Septimus's wife

  A young Italian hat-maker from Milan, lonely in London and desperate to help her husband.

• Peter Walsh, Clarissa's former suitor

  A restless, self-critical man just back from India, still half in love with Clarissa.

• Richard Dalloway, Clarissa's husband

  A decent, unimaginative Conservative Member of Parliament who wants to tell his wife he loves her.

• Elizabeth Dalloway, daughter

  Seventeen, dark and handsome, drawn for a time to Miss Kilman and thinking of a career.

• Sally Seton (Lady Rosseter), Clarissa's girlhood friend

  Once a wild, daring guest at Bourton, now the wife of a rich man near Manchester.

• Miss Doris Kilman, Elizabeth's tutor

  An impoverished history teacher, dismissed from a school in the war, who has found comfort in evangelical religion.

• Sir William Bradshaw, nerve specialist

  An eminent Harley Street physician whose rule is proportion and whose treatment is seclusion and rest.

• Dr. Holmes, general practitioner

  A hearty family doctor who insists that nothing is the matter with Septimus.

• Evans, Septimus's officer

  Killed in Italy just before the Armistice; he returns in Septimus's visions.

• Hugh Whitbread, family friend

  A polished, well-connected courtier with a minor post at Court.

• Lady Millicent Bruton, political hostess

  A soldierly old lady absorbed in a scheme for emigration to Canada.

Lessons

• One day, many minds

  Woolf passes the narrative from Clarissa to strangers in the street, to Septimus, to Peter, to Miss Kilman, joining them by shared sights and by the striking of Big Ben. The method shows that a city is made of private lives running side by side, each full and each partly hidden from the others.

  • How do the motor car and the aeroplane carry the narrative from one character to another?
  • Why does Big Ben strike so often in the novel, and what does it do to the day?
  • What do we learn about Clarissa from what others think of her that she cannot know herself?

• The war in peacetime

  The opening says the war is over, yet it lingers in Lady Bexborough's telegram, Mrs. Foxcroft's grief and above all in Septimus. Woolf sets a party in Westminster against a soldier's breakdown in Bloomsbury and makes them parts of one story.

  • Why does Septimus at first congratulate himself on feeling very little when Evans is killed?
  • In what ways is the war still present in the lives of characters who never fought?
  • Why do Clarissa and Septimus never meet?

• Healing and power

  Dr. Holmes denies that Septimus is ill; Sir William Bradshaw sees at once that he is, and orders him separated from his wife for rest. The novel asks what it means to treat a suffering person as a person, and portrays Bradshaw's proportion and conversion as forms of domination.

  • What does Sir William mean by proportion, and why does the narrator call it his goddess?
  • Why does Septimus feel that Holmes and Bradshaw are on him?
  • Is Rezia's care for Septimus a better kind of medicine, and what are its limits?

• Choices and the unlived life

  Clarissa chose Richard over Peter and a settled life over adventure, and she still loves what Sally was at Bourton. Peter and Sally have their own regrets. The novel weighs these choices without settling them, showing how the past stays present in middle age.

  • Why did Clarissa refuse Peter, and does she regret it?
  • What has become of Sally Seton, and why does she surprise Peter at the party?
  • What does Clarissa mean by her parties as an offering?

Context

The novel is set in June 1923, five years after the Armistice, in a London of motor cars, omnibuses, aeroplanes and Westminster politics, with the Prime Minister and Court never far away. Britain had lost about three-quarters of a million servicemen in the war, and many survivors had been treated for shell shock or war neurosis; a War Office committee reported on shell shock in 1922. Peter Walsh's years in India and Lady Bruton's emigration scheme place the Dalloways' world inside the British Empire of the 1920s.

Composition

Woolf began with a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, published in The Dial in July 1923, and worked through 1923 and 1924 on a novel she called The Hours. In an introduction to the 1928 Modern Library edition she wrote that Septimus did not exist in the first version and that Clarissa was at first to kill herself or simply die at the end of the party. The Hogarth Press published the book in London in May 1925, and Harcourt, Brace published it in New York the same year; the library text reproduces a later Harcourt printing.

Reception

Reviewers were divided over its method, but the novel became one of the central works of English modernism, often discussed with Joyce's Ulysses, which also confines itself to one June day in a city. Septimus Smith is among the best-known shell-shocked figures in fiction. Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) retells it, and Marleen Gorris filmed it in 1997.

Comparisons

• the-waves

  Woolf's later novel carries the passing of the narrative from mind to mind further, giving six speakers' soliloquies across a lifetime instead of one London day.

• orlando

  Three years later Woolf turned from a single day to a life of three and a half centuries; both books ask what makes a self continuous through time.

• a-farewell-to-arms

  Evans dies on the Italian front where Hemingway's Frederic Henry serves; Hemingway gives the war itself in plain declaratives, Woolf only its afterlife in a London mind.

• testament-of-youth

  Vera Brittain's memoir records the grief and the changed postwar London that Woolf's minor characters carry, from the side of a nurse who lost her fiancé, brother and friends.

• the-death-of-ivan-ilyich

  Tolstoy's dying judge and Woolf's Septimus both face physicians who treat the case and not the man, and both books end in a strange acceptance of death.

• the-great-gatsby

  Published the same spring of 1925, Fitzgerald's novel also turns on a man who returns to find the woman he loved married to another and on a party that hides a death.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The striking of Big Ben and other clocks, and what each character is doing when it strikes.
• The motor car in Bond Street and the skywriting aeroplane, and how they carry the story from Clarissa to strangers and then to Septimus.
• The line from the dirge in Cymbeline that Clarissa reads in Hatchards' window and that returns to both her and Septimus.
• Peter Walsh's pocket-knife and Clarissa's scissors and needle during his visit.
• Clarissa alone in the little room at the party, and the old lady in the window opposite.

Key terms and names

Bourton

The country house of Clarissa's family, where thirty years earlier she refused Peter, met Richard and loved Sally Seton.

Shell shock

The period name for the mental breakdowns of soldiers in the First World War; the novel never uses it, but Septimus is the book's portrait of such a man.

Proportion

Sir William Bradshaw's word for sanity, which the narrator mockingly calls his goddess, joined to her fiercer sister, conversion.

Harley Street

The London street of fashionable medical specialists where the Smiths keep their noon appointment.

Free indirect discourse

Woolf's way of giving a character's thoughts in the narrator's third-person voice, sliding without warning from one mind to another.

Member of Parliament

Richard Dalloway's office; he sits as a Conservative in the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister comes to Clarissa's party.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Clarissa remember about Bourton, Peter Walsh and Sally Seton during her walk to buy flowers?
2. Comprehension What happened to Septimus in the war, and how did he come to marry Rezia?
3. Comprehension What do Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw each conclude about Septimus, and what do they propose?
4. Interpretation Why does the narrator call proportion Sir William's goddess, and what is the narrator's attitude to him?
5. Interpretation Why does Clarissa feel glad, and somehow very like him, when she hears of the young man's death?
6. Interpretation What does Woolf gain by never letting Clarissa and Septimus meet?
7. Interpretation Is Clarissa's party a trivial thing or, as she thinks, an offering? What evidence does the book give either way?
8. Big Question What do we owe those who suffer in mind, and how can help become a kind of power over them?

Faith Connections

• Romans 12:15 (Scripture)

  Paul asks believers to rejoice with them that rejoice and weep with them that weep. On the same evening Clarissa gives a party and Rezia loses her husband, and the novel asks whether any person can do both at once.

• Ecclesiastes 3:1-4 (Scripture)

  A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance: the striking of Big Ben measures one June day that holds Septimus's death and Clarissa's party.

• Matthew 11:28-30 (Scripture)

  Christ offers rest to the weary and heavy laden. Sir William's rest cure is imposed by authority and separates Septimus from love; the contrast sharpens what rest given in care might mean.

• Augustine, Confessions XI (Great Conversation)

  Augustine asks what time is and finds it in the mind's memory, attention and expectation. Woolf's day, in which Clarissa lives in 1923 and at Bourton in the same moment, is a novelist's version of that inquiry.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A single day in a city holds many lives that touch without meeting. The war, though over, has left a man unable to feel and his doctors have no language for him except proportion and confinement. A woman who has chosen safety and society still feels the pull of death and of the unlived life. Therefore the novel argues that the private life of the mind is as real and as serious as public events, and that the party and the suicide belong to one story.

Rhetorical device: refrain. The sentence about the leaden circles dissolving in the air marks the striking of Big Ben and returns at the end of the party, so that the hours of the day become a repeated figure for time passing over every mind at once.

Debate: Resolved: that Clarissa Dalloway was right to marry Richard rather than Peter Walsh.

Memory Work

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using Dr. Holmes, Sir William Bradshaw and Rezia, argue what the novel holds up as true care for a suffering person and what it presents as its counterfeit.

Comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front: Paul Bäumer cannot speak to his family on leave; Septimus Smith cannot feel in peacetime London. Compare how Remarque and Woolf show the gulf between the soldier and those at home, and which book makes that gulf more vivid.

Medical Lens

Septimus Warren Smith is one of the most closely observed portraits of a disturbed war veteran in English fiction. Woolf gives his numbness after Evans's death, his conviction that he has committed a crime, the voices and visions of the dead, the sense of a message for the Prime Minister, and his terror of the doctors; modern readers often describe these as combat-related trauma with psychotic features, but that is a retrospective reading, and the novel uses none of the clinical labels beyond Bradshaw's talk of nerves and proportion. The two physicians represent two period responses: Dr. Holmes, the general practitioner, prescribes porridge, golf and bromide and insists there is nothing the matter; Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street specialist, identifies serious illness within minutes and prescribes a long rest cure in a private home in the country, separation from his wife and from books and friends, and weight gain, in the manner of the rest cure associated with Silas Weir Mitchell. The narrator's attack on Bradshaw's proportion and conversion is one of the sharpest satires of psychiatric authority in literature. Biographers record that Woolf herself was treated with rest cures by several physicians during her episodes of illness, and critics have often linked Bradshaw to that experience; the link is interpretive. The book is also a study of a sane woman's long recovery from influenza and of her thoughts on suicide as communication.

• Morning, Regent's Park

  Septimus sees Evans behind the railings, hears the sparrows sing in Greek and believes he must not cut down trees, while Rezia tries to follow Dr. Holmes's advice to make him notice real things.

  Madness Psychosis Trauma Shell Shock Altered States
• Midday, Septimus's history

  Evans's death in Italy, Septimus's pride at feeling nothing, the panic in Milan that drives him to propose to Lucrezia, and the later discovery that he cannot feel or taste.

  Trauma Shell Shock Grief Melancholia Depression
• Midday, Dr. Holmes's visits

  Holmes's cheerful prescriptions and his refusal to see illness, and Septimus's growing dread of him as the agent of human nature.

  Physicians Doctors Medical Ethics
• Noon, Harley Street

  Sir William Bradshaw's consultation, the decision to send Septimus to a country home, and the narrator's long passage on proportion and conversion.

  Physicians Doctors Asylum Institution Medical Ethics
• Late afternoon, the Bloomsbury lodging

  A calm hour over Mrs. Peters's hat, then Holmes on the stairs and Septimus's leap from the window; the ambulance that Peter hears in the street.

  Suicide Death Dying
• Evening, the party

  Clarissa's meditation in the little room on the young man's death, on defiance and communication, and her return to her guests.

  Suicide Grief

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Rezia's letter home to her sister in Milan on the evening of the day, telling what happened in Harley Street and after.

• Essay

  Clarissa and Septimus never meet. Argue whether the novel joins them through images, through Big Ben and the Cymbeline dirge, or through Clarissa's feeling at the party, and what that joining means.

• Classroom

  Map the day on a London map: Westminster, Bond Street, Regent's Park, Harley Street, the Strand, Bloomsbury, and mark which character is at each place when Big Ben strikes.

Further Reading

• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

  Woolf's next novel (1927), with its own central section on the war and time.

• A Writer's Diary, Virginia Woolf (ed. Leonard Woolf)

  Selections from the diary, including entries on the writing of The Hours.

• Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee

• The Hours, Michael Cunningham

  A 1998 novel that interweaves a day in Woolf's life with modern versions of Clarissa's day.

• A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914-1994, Ben Shephard

• The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell