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[Revised, pictures add 4/24/22]

Virginia Woolf set out to write an unconventional novel and succeeded, although since she wrote, we have read so many unconventional novels that it seems tame. In her introduction to the edition I read, Maureen Howard writes: “If ever there was a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously modern novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway.��

Woolf may have been influenced by Ulysses because all the action occurs in one day. Church bells mark significant events. In turn this marking of the day influenced The Hours, a book based on Woolf’s life, by Michael Cunningham.



But unlike in Joyce’s work, this is not an ordinary day. True, it centers on what we would now call a cocktail party �� Mrs. Dalloway lived for those and hosted them frequently �� but it’s also the day when a former flame of hers (the fire on his part, not hers) returns from five years in India. And it’s also a day when one of the characters we follow commits suicide. His doctor arrives at the party and announces this to everyone as soon as he’s inside the door �� now there’s a downer!

Through her reflections and that of several other characters we learn the details of Mrs. Dalloway’s life. She’s 52, pale, a bit sickly, attractive enough but not beautiful. We learn of her husband, a nice man, a government bureaucrat whose career has peaked �� he will never be a Minister.

Mrs. Dalloway worries about her husband having lunch today with another woman friend of hers - Mrs. Dalloway was not invited; that’s unusual. Of her daughter, she worries that she is being “unduly influenced�� by the religion of her female tutor (Catholicism we assume?). And of course she worries about meeting the old flame. He still loves her after 30 years, a marriage and various affairs. True love or arrested development?



The book, published in 1925, is also a time capsule of daily life in London in the early post-WW I years. It’s a time when horses are still being replaced by cars. As we follow her around town in her preparations we see the hustle and bustle of the city, the grocers, the shop girls, the crazies in the park.

A good book. It makes you think about life and death. You can’t ask for more than that. Her language is also fun. When is the last time you were “whelmed?�� Not overwhelmed �� just plain old whelmed? What’s a Holland bag? In the discussion below we finally figured out that it is a cloth bag to cover a chandelier to prevent it from getting dusty.



Top photo of 1930s cocktail party from pompandwhiskey.com
Hyde Park in the 1920s from pinterest.com.au
The author (1882-1941) from lithub.com