Featured Reading Guide
Virginia Woolf
Tracing a day in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. First published in 1925, MRS DALLOWAY is her first complete rendering of what Woolf described as the ‘luminous envelope’ of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.
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Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography . After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of The Bloomsbury Group . This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob s Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf s distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One s Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother s death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts , Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
topAbout the Book
Tracing a day in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. First published in 1925, MRS DALLOWAY is her first complete rendering of what Woolf described as the ‘luminous envelope’ of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.
topVirginia Woolf interview/review
Author interview not available (here are some comments by Virginia Woolf instead)
On Mrs Dalloway ‘I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane and the insane, side by side’.
‘In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.’
Extracts taken from A Passionate Apprentice: the early journals – Virginia Woolf, Pimlico, February 2004
‘Descriptive writing is dangerous & tempting. It is easy, with little expense of brain power, to make something. One seizes some broad aspect, as of water or colour, & makes a note of it. This single quality gives the tone of a piece. As a matter of fact, the subject is probably infinitely subtle, no more amenable to impressionistic treatment than the human character. What one records is really the state of ones own mind.’
Woolf wishes to discover ‘some real thing behind appearances’. These ‘moments of being’ she describes as blows of ‘sledge-hammer force’ ‘as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow…the shock receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow…it is, or will become a revelation of some order; it is some token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost it’s power to hurt me; it gives me…a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.’
‘To be socially great, I believe, is a really noble ambition – for consider what it means. You have, for a certain space of time to realise as nearly as can be, an ideal…You come to a party meaning to give pleasure; therefore you leave your sorrows and worries at home – for the moment…The truth is, to be successful socially one wants the courage of a hero. There is nothing really so desperately difficult, I am sure, as laughter. The whole pressure of the world is to make you take things seriously…It is a luxury to most people to express their emotions. Society is the most bracing antidote for this kind of thing; to be successful I think one must be a Stoic with a heart.’
Her suicide note (addressed to her husband Leonard Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell):
‘I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on any longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.’
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Virginia Woolf describes her stream-of-consciousness technique as a ‘tunnelling process’. ‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters…I tell the past in instalments as I have need of it.’ How do you think the use of the stream of consciousness technique affects your reading of Mrs Dalloway?
- Clarissa’s insight that Septimus ‘was somehow like her’ may seem radical in light of their differences in social standing, gender and background. How can Septimus be seen as Mrs Dalloway’s alter-ego or other self in the novel?
- Mrs Dalloway may be read as a critique of a post-war society that kills the soul and that has lost all sense of value and direction. Think about Septimus’s descent into madness, his medical treatment and Mrs Dalloway’s response to his suicide (‘Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate.’), in light of these ideas.
- Virginia Woolf examines the nature of our sense of self in Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Dalloway is aware that she cannot be compartmentalized into a single person ‘She alone knew how different the parts were’, ‘she would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or they were that’. Examine the idea of sense of self in Mrs Dalloway in light of these characters and any other characters you may wish to bring into the discussion.
- Conversion is seen as a constant threat in the novel. Which characters wish to convert others, and what are they trying to convert others to? Are some characters more susceptible to conversion than others?
- Nature is referred to many times throughout the novels. Look at they way certain characters relate to the natural world. What does this tell you about them?
Other Books by Virginia Woolf
A Haunted House: The Complete…
Acclaimed on its first publication, rich in fictional delights, this complete…
A Passionate Apprentice
A Passionate Apprentice comprises the first years of Virginia Woolf’s Journal…
A Room Of One’s Own And Three…
This volume combines for the first time in paperback two books by Virginia …
Between The Acts
BETWEEN THE ACTS, one of Virginia Woolf’s most lyrical works, was published …
Congenial Spirits: Selected…
Congenial Spirits, selected and edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks, brings to…
Flush
First published in 1933, Flush is the lively story of Elizabeth Barrett Bro…
Jacobs Room
Jacob’s Room is Virgina Woolf’s first truly experimental novel. It is a por…
Moments Of Being
Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing is to be found in this colle…
Mrs Dalloway
Tracing a day in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf…
Suggested Further Reading
- Virginia Woolf ~ Hermione Lee
- Tristram Shandy ~ Laurence Sterne
- The Hours ~ Michael Cunningham