Mrs Dalloway (1925) is Virginia Woolf's novel of a single day in June 1923 in London, as Clarissa Dalloway, a member of Parliament's wife, prepares for the party she is giving that evening. Her thoughts and memories alternate with those of Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran shattered by the war, whom she never meets. It is one of the masterpieces of the modernist novel.
The story
Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, walks through Westminster on a June morning to buy flowers for her party. She remembers her youth at Bourton, and the man she refused to marry, Peter Walsh, who returns from India that very day and calls on her.
In Regent's Park, Septimus Warren Smith, a former soldier tormented by the death of his friend Evans in the war, sits with his Italian wife, Rezia, before a consultation with a doctor who does not understand him. In the evening, at the party, Clarissa hears of the young man's death and reflects on it.
A day in the mind
The narrative glides from one consciousness to another, often linked by a passing car, an aeroplane writing letters in the sky or the striking of Big Ben, whose hours mark the passage of the day. Woolf spoke of digging caves behind her characters, which connect with one another.
The book has no chapters. Its use of interior monologue and free indirect speech made it, with James Joyce's Ulysses, also set on a single day, a defining work of modernism.
From a short story to a novel
Clarissa and Richard Dalloway had already appeared in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). In 1923 she published a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, which grew into the novel.
Woolf wrote it in 1923–24, and the Hogarth Press, which she ran with her husband Leonard, published it on 14 May 1925, with a cover designed by her sister Vanessa Bell.
Anecdotes
The Hours
While writing the novel, Woolf called it The Hours. In 1998 the American writer Michael Cunningham took that title for a novel linking Woolf herself, a reader of Mrs Dalloway in the 1950s and a modern-day Clarissa; it won the Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 2002.
A double
Woolf noted in her introduction to a 1928 edition that in the first version of the book Septimus did not exist, and that Clarissa herself was to die or kill herself at the end of the party. Septimus came to be her double.
Frequently asked questions
When was Mrs Dalloway published?
On 14 May 1925, by the Hogarth Press in London.
How long does the story of Mrs Dalloway last?
A single day, a Wednesday in mid-June 1923, from morning to the end of Clarissa's party.
Who is Septimus Warren Smith?
A young veteran of the First World War suffering from shell shock, whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, although the two never meet.