Friday essay: Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

I’m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I’m re-reading, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?

If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa’s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus’s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.

Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on an ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are filtered through their individual consciousnesses, threaded together with language, images and memories.

The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is demonstrated by the number of online parodies it inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a verified meme.

A new seam

On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of the manuscript she was drafting – then called “The Hours” – that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could write whatever she wanted to write because she owned her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond home.

Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to be self-published in this way. Being a small-press publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that would have been impossible if she was working with a mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do my scales”.

I recently co-hosted a conference here in Hobart, which included a panel on contemporary Tasmanian experimental writing. The writers who spoke that day talked of the struggle to place work that pushed the boundaries of form and genre. A hundred years after Woolf’s efforts to unearth what she called a new “seam”, commercial imperatives continue to constrain writers and their work.

Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion.

It sold moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year. Her biographer Hermione Lee records that in 1926 income from writing allowed Woolf and her husband Leonard to install a hot water range and toilet at their country home.

Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its challenge to the novel form and representation of time. Clarissa remembers the jolt of desire she felt as an 18-year-old for her friend Sally Seton, who kisses her on the terrace of her house at Bourton:

the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Clarissa, made “virginal” in middle age by illness and marital boredom, is surprised by this irrupting memory. She connects it to her sense of joy in life itself: “the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings […] collecting the whole of her at one point”.

Clarissa and Septimus Smith – though they never meet – are shadow versions of each other. Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness.

Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of the social system – what Woolf’s narrator ironises as the sister goddesses Conversion and Proportion.

“Worshipping proportion […] made England prosper”, because proportion forbids despair, illness, and emotional extremes. Conversion, the strong arm of Empire, “offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, the dissatisfied”. Conversion “loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will”. Together, they suck the life from those who cannot or will not comply with them.

For Septimus, who has witnessed the dreadful disproportion of the war, ordinary social life becomes a torturous pressure cooker, a “gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames”. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement emphasised this aspect of its experimentalism:

Watching Mrs Woolf’s experiment, certainly one of the hardest and very subtly planned, one reckons up its cost. To get the whole value of the present you must enhance it, perhaps, with the past.

Watching my daughter lark about is shadowed by the two surgeries she had in early childhood to correct her developmental hip dysplasia. I hear her screech with joy in the park, rocketing about freely; I hear her scream in pain in the hospital, encased in plaster from the midsection down. As Woolf knew, the past and the present are experienced within us simultaneously.

Doubled experience

“In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “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.”

Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now probably the most written-about 20th century English author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which criticised the educational, economic and social constraints that prevented women, in many instances, from writing anything at all.

Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. Feminist politics has progressed beyond Woolf, but she laid one of the foundation stones. In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot.

The same year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, she also published her important collection of essays, The Common Reader. The first piece in that book, on the medieval letters of the Paston family, describes the illumination cast by these ordinary, non-literary pieces of writing:

Like all collections of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the fortunes of individuals. The family will go on, whether Sir John lives or dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes.

Mrs Dalloway encompasses this doubled experience of insignificance and blazing life. Woolf writes of the past emerging into the present day and the present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she called this her “tunnelling process, by which I tell the past in instalments, as I have need of it”.

In tunnelling through narrative, digging out caves behind her characters, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust – buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their significance, through repeated reference to the bells and clocks of London striking the hour.

This is why the opening line – and the novel as a whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop time. As she wrote of the Pastons’ letters: “There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.”

Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of different perspectives through a single shared moment in time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and moves through that individual’s memories.

Woolf wrote in her diary that “the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” Daiches diagrammed these relations in time and space as a series of connected trees, arguing that they illustrated the novel’s concern with “the importance of contact and at the same time the necessity of keeping the self inviolable, of the extremes of isolation and domination”.

A legacy of inspiration

Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued to inspire. For second-wave feminism, Woolf was a touchstone. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an unparalleled position in the history of 20th century letters, inspiring the recovery of other contemporaneous women writers connected with the Bloomsbury group.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or explicitly.

Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she throws a literary party.

Cunningham’s novel counterpoints, as Woolf did, the work of living with the work of art. The homemaker Laura Brown tries to bake a cake to equal a work of art, hoping “to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence, a builder beginning to draw the plans.” Later, her delirious dying son Richard regrets what he views as the failure of his art to compete with simply living:

I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine trying to do that. What foolishness.

More recently, Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf (2023) and Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead (2024) have wrestled with Mrs Dalloway the character, and with Woolf’s legacy. Darling’s novel revives a new “Mrs” Dalloway, Winona, a wealthy Sydney suburban writer, wife and mother, who struggles to break through “to something more real” than the constraint of middle class domestication.

Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf explores a minor character from Mrs Dalloway, whom Woolf failed to make properly live: Daisy Simmons, Peter Walsh’s Anglo-Indian fiancee. In Woolf’s novel, Daisy exists entirely offstage. She is a romantic memory of Peter’s, “dark, adorably pretty”. Daisy, writes Cahill, is

trapped in the past, in a moment, a vignette, but not the kind that would enter a room, open a window, to a life inside, a life in the mind, as it does for Clarissa with a squeak of hinges on the very first page of Mrs Dalloway! Not a real girl, Daisy, too arch perhaps, the air not stirring for her, seeing as she has no present tense.

Cahill’s present-day narrator Mina, writing back to Woolf, sees Daisy as a fully fleshed character: a mixed-race woman living in Calcutta in the twilight of Empire, as the Indian independence movement grows in strength. In recovering Daisy’s rich personal and political history, narrated through letters to Peter, Cahill reclaims interiority for this marginalised character.

In her 1937 essay Craftsmanship, the BBC broadcast of which is the only surviving recording of her voice, Woolf wrote: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations.”

Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same event from different vantage points and through different filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee explained, for Woolf “the really important life was ‘within’”.

Peter remembers Clarissa’s theory of life, which is expounded on top of a bus going down Shaftesbury Avenue:

She felt herself everywhere; not here here here; […] but everywhere. […] so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places […] since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.

Late in the book, Septimus’s suicide is reported to Clarissa at the party. “Oh,” she thinks, “in the middle of my party, here’s death”. And in the middle of her party, Clarissa feels not only the disaster of death – “her disaster, her disgrace […] and she forced to stand here in her evening dress” – but the deep pulsing joy of life. “Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.”

In certain lights – to paraphrase Michael Cunningham – Mrs Dalloway might look like the book of one’s own life, a book that will locate you, parent you, arm you for life’s changes. As an undergraduate, I was mesmerised by Woolf’s language and her grasp on the inner life.

Though Clarissa Dalloway is 52, Woolf turned 43 the year her novel was published. I’m turning 43 this year, too. Woolf, ravaged by long periods of illness and partially toothless, thought of herself as elderly. I do not, though I am no longer young. But to re-read this novel at this age reminds me to relish these long hours and short years: to sniff flowers, feel the lift of the gusting wind, jump and splash with my children, read the patterns made by the clouds. To seize the day.

Naomi Milthorpe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.