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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.