In brief
Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of a Member of Parliament, walks across Westminster one morning in June to buy flowers for her party. Across the same streets Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the trenches, sits in Regent’s Park with his Italian wife and hears the sparrows sing in Greek. By evening he has thrown himself from a window to escape his doctors, and one of those doctors brings the news to her party, where she goes alone into a small room and thinks about it. The two never meet.
It runs for one day without chapters. Its reputation for difficulty is undeserved, since the sentences are clear; what asks for attention is the way the book passes from one mind to the next without warning.
The argument
The book’s claim, I think, is that a society can be judged by what it does to people it cannot use, and that Clarissa’s world and Septimus’s death belong to one system. Woolf said as much while she was writing it: “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense” (diary, 19 June 1923). The system has a face. Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street specialist, sends Septimus to a home in the country, and the narrator names his method: “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair” (Harley Street). The Bradshaws are also guests at Clarissa’s party, and they arrive late because of the suicide.
So her parties cannot be innocent. She has an answer she can barely phrase: the people she knows live in separate places, and “it was an offering; to combine, to create”. The novel neither laughs at this nor lets it stand alone. When she hears about the young man she is first angry that death has come in, then goes further: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved.” And then, coldly and wonderfully: “She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away” (the little room).
That gladness is the hardest moment in the book, and it should not be softened. A rich woman with a pleasant house uses a stranger’s death to feel her own life more sharply, then goes back to her guests. Woolf knows this. She had herself attempted suicide and been treated by doctors like Bradshaw, and she gives Clarissa the insight without giving her the excuse.
The shape of the book
Woolf’s working title was The Hours, and the clocks keep the title’s promise. Big Ben strikes on Clarissa’s first walk (“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air”), and that last sentence returns as a refrain. The clocks of Harley Street go on “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing”, until a commercial clock above an Oxford Street shop gives the hour with Rigby and Lowndes’s compliments. Public time is one more instrument of proportion.
There are no chapters, only white space. Standard Ebooks’ text divides it into eleven stretches, and the longest of them holds Harley Street, the lunch, the roses, Miss Kilman, Elizabeth’s omnibus and Septimus’s death. Within those stretches Woolf hands the narration on by contact. A car backfires in Bond Street and everyone looks at it. An aeroplane writes in the sky and everyone looks up, each reading a different word. The ambulance carrying Septimus passes Peter Walsh, who thinks it “one of the triumphs of civilisation”. Clarissa and Septimus are joined only by such things, and by a line of Shakespeare, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, which both of them recall.
The voice
The first sentence looks like a neutral report, but “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is already half inside her head; nobody but Clarissa needs to mention that it is unusual. The next line goes to Lucy and the doors, and the third to the plunge of memory: “What a lark! What a plunge!” We are at Bourton, thirty years ago, without any signal that we have left Westminster. Woolf named the method on 15 October 1923: “what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it”. Six weeks earlier she had put it more beautifully: “how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters”, and “The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment”.
This is the opposite of what she saw in Joyce. The technique is not a transcript of thought. The sentences stay long, syntactically composed and hers, and the mind is reported by a narrator who is always present in the “she thought” and the semicolons. So it can be mocking about Hugh Whitbread’s waistcoat and tender about Rezia’s hat in the same half-hour.
Reading Ulysses
Woolf’s reading of Joyce is well documented, and the record is odder than the famous insult. Dates and wording here follow James Heffernan’s two Modernism Lab essays, which quote the Diary and Letters: 1918 to 1920 and 1922 to 1941.
On 14 April 1918 Harriet Weaver brought the first chapters to the Woolfs at Hogarth House, hoping their small press would print them. Woolf declined on grounds of length, and told Lytton Strachey what she thought of the matter: “First there’s a dog that p’s—then there’s man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject”. Yet in “Modern Novels” (1919), revised as “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader weeks before this novel, Joyce is the one young writer she takes seriously. The cemetery scene in “Hades” comes “so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece.” On 26 September 1920, stuck in Jacob’s Room, she told her diary the truth: “He said nothing—but I reflected how what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” “He” is T. S. Eliot, who had been praising the book.
The book appeared in February 1922. By April she had paid £4 for a blue copy and was writing “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”. To Clive Bell she wrote, “I look, and sip, and shudder.” On 16 August, with “Mrs Dalloway” going badly, she stopped at page 200 and wrote the passage everyone quotes. She had been “amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” Then: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?” Joyce held a university degree. She added, “I may revise this later.” To Strachey, later that month: “Never did I read such tosh.”
On 6 September she wrote, “I finished Ulysses, & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water”; a first-rate writer “respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts”. Then, honestly, “I have not read it carefully; & only once”. Heffernan doubts she can have read the 532 remaining pages in eleven days. The next day Leonard showed her Gilbert Seldes’s review, and she conceded: “Probably the final beauty of writing is never felt by contemporaries; but they ought, I think, to be bowled over; and this I was not. Then again, I had my back up on purpose”. A letter to Roger Fry in early October has her bound to it “like a martyr to a stake”. By the middle of that month “Mrs Dalloway” had become a book.
The novel’s debt is plain: two wanderers, one city, one day in “the middle of June”, inner life laid open, a suicide’s shadow. Heffernan, citing Harvena Richter, records that early drafts called Septimus “Stephen” and Sally “Molly”. The most telling sentence is one she cut. In the raw text of her 1924 Cambridge lecture, the essay that became “Character in Fiction”, she says of Joyce’s smashing of conventions that it aims to keep close to “my idea of Mrs Brown”, and corrects herself: “Mrs Bloom, I mean”. In print she kept the attack on him as “a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows”.
Joyce died on 13 January 1941. Two days later she wrote, “Then Joyce is dead—Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am”, and remembered Miss Weaver “in wool gloves”, the typescript in “the drawer of the inlaid cabinet”, and Katherine Mansfield starting to read in ridicule, then saying there was something in this. Her last word on reading it was “spasms of wonder, of discovery”, then “long lapses of immense boredom”. He was eight days younger. She drowned ten weeks later.
The people
Clarissa Dalloway
Clarissa is a snob, she knows it, and the book likes her anyway. Her “only gift was knowing people almost by instinct”, and her heart is “affected, they said, by influenza”. She has “the oddest sense of being herself invisible” on Bond Street. Her one great moment, she thinks, was Sally Seton’s kiss on the terrace at Bourton: “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”.
Septimus Warren Smith
Septimus went to France “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress”. His officer, Evans, was killed; they had been like “two dogs playing on a hearthrug”. His illness is the inability to grieve: “He could not feel.” Woolf drew his hallucinations from her own, and they include some of the book’s most beautiful prose. In his one clear hour he and Rezia trim a hat, and he is happy; then Dr Holmes comes up the stairs.
Peter Walsh
Peter was rejected by Clarissa thirty years ago, returns from India in love with a married woman, and plays with a pocketknife. He is the book’s comic relief and its best witness, because he sees exactly what is wrong with her and cannot stop loving her.
Sir William Bradshaw and Dr Holmes
Holmes is a bluff fool and Bradshaw is something worse, a man of charm and tact whose wife’s character has “gone under”, and who practises “Conversion” on the patients. Their cruelty is professional and well meant.
Miss Kilman and Elizabeth
Doris Kilman, dismissed from a teaching post in the war for her German family, is poor, religious and in love with Clarissa’s seventeen-year-old daughter. Clarissa hates her with a precision that shames both. Elizabeth, escaping, boards an omnibus and rides up the Strand, for a few pages the one person in the book with a future.
How it was made
The Dalloways first appear in The Voyage Out (1915). The short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”, written in 1922 and published in The Dial in July 1923, opens “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself”. On 14 October 1922 she noted that “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book; and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side”. In her introduction to the 1928 Modern Library edition she recalled that Clarissa was first “to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party”, and that Septimus, “who later is intended to be her double”, did not yet exist. Her doubt about the heroine is in the diary too: “It may be too stiff, too glittering and tinsely.” Hogarth Press, the Woolfs’ own firm, published the novel on 14 May 1925 with a jacket by Vanessa Bell.
Readers and critics
Suzette Henke argued that Woolf saw Joyce as an artistic double, which Heffernan accepts only in part. In The New York Review of Books in 2022 and 2023, Edward Mendelson argued that Septimus’s chosen death is how the novel goes deeper than Ulysses, and Heffernan replied that Bloom’s father killed himself, so the deaths in Joyce are not all natural. Heffernan has the fact and Mendelson the point: Septimus’s death happens in the present tense. In the same exchange Mark Hussey objected to Merve Emre’s annotated edition for building a text of its own, against Woolf’s own British and American decisions.
Afterlives
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) borrows the working title, and Stephen Daldry’s film (2002) put Nicole Kidman in Woolf’s place. Marleen Gorris’s film (1997), adapted by Eileen Atkins, has Vanessa Redgrave as Clarissa. Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works (2015) gives the book its first act, and Clarissa (2026) moves the day to Lagos.
What is free, and where
Woolf died in 1941, so the novel has been in the public domain since 1 January 2012 in the United Kingdom, the EU and other places that count seventy years from an author’s death. In the United States it was protected for ninety-five years from publication and came free on 1 January 2021. The link on this page goes to Standard Ebooks, whose edition is a corrected text based on Project Gutenberg Australia’s transcription and Internet Archive scans; they clear it for the United States and tell readers elsewhere to check local law. It is also free at Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Australia. Her diaries and letters, published decades later, are not part of these free texts and are quoted here only in short.
How to read it
- Read the first ten pages twice. Everything to come is laid out in them, including the Shakespeare and the bell.
- Keep going when you lose the thread. The next person named is usually the new mind.
- Do not skip Lady Bruton’s lunch. It looks like comic relief. It is the same system seen from the top.
- Read Septimus slowly. His pages make a mind ill from the inside without once saying so.
- Choose an edition with notes if you go further. Oxford World’s Classics and the Penguin with Elaine Showalter’s introduction both serve well. Woolf’s British and American texts differ in details, and scholars still argue about which to prefer.
Read next
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). The rival, read as she could not read it, to the end.
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). Her next book, in which the same method goes home to her parents.
- Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1998). Three women under the novel’s spell, which works best after the original.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991). The doctor’s side of shell shock, seen by a much better doctor than Bradshaw.
- Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005). Another single London day, a doctor at the centre, a family dinner and a violent interruption.