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Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence
Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence
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This collection of stories was first assembled by Hogarth Press in 1973, and so can not be consider as a collection that Virginia Woolf had intended as such, neither one (unlike A Haunted House and Other Short Stories) assembled by Leonard based on her wishes. That said it works extremely well as a companion to the novel (book:Mrs. Dalloway|14942].
The publisher's description though explains the logic of the choice:
The reader first met Mrs Dalloway in Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out (1915). "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" (written 1922) was published in The Dial in 1923, and originally intended as the opening chapter of the later novel (1925).
It opens, as does the novel Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself but otherwise departs from the text of the novel (no "What a lark! What a plunge!" here), although much of the same ground, literally, is covered as Mrs Dalloway walks around the West End.
[Not included here is the unfinished story "The Prime Minister" which was, like "Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street", to be incorporated, in an adapted form, into the novel.]
Four of the stories in this Short Story Sequence, "The New Dress", "Together and Apart", "A Man Who Loved His Kind" and "A Summing Up" were previously included in the collection A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, assembled by Leonard Woolf shortly after his wife's death.
"The New Dress" was published in Virginia's lifetime, so can be considered to be finalised, but he noted that, in respect of the last three stories, none of them... are finally revised by her, and she would certainly have done a great deal of work on them before she published them ... [they] are only just in the stage beyond that of her first sketch.
The final two stories, "The Introduction" and "Ancestors", were also not published in Woolf's lifetime, so presumably should be considered in the same way, as non-final sketches.
"The New Dress", written in 1924 but not published until 1927, after the novel, is thereby the closest to a final work and is a wonderfully drawn piece of a guest at Mrs Dalloway's party (Mabel Waring, mentioned in passing in the novel), very anxious and self-conscious of how she, and the new, but very old-fashioned, dress she had made for occasion, are perceived by others.
She strained and strained (standing in front of the looking-glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer. (Envy and spite, the most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)
"The Introduction" (c. Spring 1925) focuses on one of the guests at the part, Lily Everit, at her first party as an adult, as Mrs Dalloway seeks to introduce her to the gathering.
‘Come and let me introduce you,� and there Mrs Dalloway hesitated, and then remembering that Lily was the clever one who read poetry, looked about for some young man, some young man just down from Oxford, who would have read everything and would talk about himself. And holding Lily Everit’s hand she led her towards a group where there were young people talking.
Lily Everit hung back a little, might have been in the wake of a steamer; felt as Mrs Dalloway led her on, that it was now going to happen; that nothing could prevent it, or save her (and she only wanted it to be over now) from being flung into a whirlpool where either she would perish or be saved.
She introduces her to a young man, a fellow fan of Shelley, but Lily's view of him, and society in general, is jolted as she catches him casually killing a fly by ripping off its wings, a wonderful defining moment making this a powerful story.
"Ancestors" (May 1925) centres on Mrs Valliance who while talking to another guest, compares him, and the party and indeed London generally, unfavourably to her Scottish upbringing:
Mrs Vallance, as she replied to Jack Renshaw who had made that rather silly remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, wished that she could make him understand somehow what became every moment more obvious at a party like this, that if her father had been alive people would have realised how foolish, how wicked—no, not so much wicked as silly and ugly—how, compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial. How very different his mind was, and his life; and her mother, and how differently, entirely differently she herself had been brought up.
"The Man Who Loved His Kind" has Richard Dalloway bump into an old school friend, Pricket Ellis, he has not seen for 20 years and invite him to the party (Wouldn't he drop in that evening ... one or two people were coming.). But Prickett Ellis doesn't find the party to his taste - It was the sort of thing that made his gorge rise. Think of grown up, responsible men and women doing this every night of their lives! ... he glared ever more severely at these people, overdressed, cynical and pompous, whereas his one and only extravagance was his little yacht on the Norfolk Broads. He sees himself as a man of the people, who loves his own kind, but when he tries to explain this to one of the guests she finds him equally self-obsessed.
"Together and Apart" (early 1925) has Mrs Dalloway introduce two guests, Miss Anning and Roderick Serle, who discover a shared link in Canterbury, where each spent some of their most intense moments, but one that illuminates their very different personalities:
‘Yes, I know Canterbury,� he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought, often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two � he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from the society of and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write.
"A Summing Up" has Mr Bertram Pritchard and Mrs Latham, leaving the party for the peace of the garden. And while he chunters on, superficially, she retreats into her inner, rather more philsophical, musings:
Written down what he said would be incredible—not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.
Sasha Latham would be thinking while he chattered on about his tour in Devonshire, about inns and landladies, about Eddie and Freddie, about cows and night travelling, about cream and stars, about continental railways and Bradshaw, catching cod, catching cold, influenza, rheumatism and Keats—she was thinking of him in the abstract as a person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in the guise that was different from what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove it.
Overall, a great companion volume to the brilliant novel, perhaps not so convincing stand alone but 4 stars as a companion piece.
The publisher's description though explains the logic of the choice:
The landmark modern novel Mrs Dalloway creates a portrait of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote this masterwork, she explored in a series of fascinating stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party.
Wonderfully captivating, the seven stories in Mrs. Dalloway's Party create a dynamic and delightful portrait of what Woolf called "party consciousness." As parallel expressions of the themes of Mrs. Dalloway, these stories provide a valuable window into Woolf's writing mind and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.
The reader first met Mrs Dalloway in Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out (1915). "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" (written 1922) was published in The Dial in 1923, and originally intended as the opening chapter of the later novel (1925).
It opens, as does the novel Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself but otherwise departs from the text of the novel (no "What a lark! What a plunge!" here), although much of the same ground, literally, is covered as Mrs Dalloway walks around the West End.
[Not included here is the unfinished story "The Prime Minister" which was, like "Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street", to be incorporated, in an adapted form, into the novel.]
Four of the stories in this Short Story Sequence, "The New Dress", "Together and Apart", "A Man Who Loved His Kind" and "A Summing Up" were previously included in the collection A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, assembled by Leonard Woolf shortly after his wife's death.
"The New Dress" was published in Virginia's lifetime, so can be considered to be finalised, but he noted that, in respect of the last three stories, none of them... are finally revised by her, and she would certainly have done a great deal of work on them before she published them ... [they] are only just in the stage beyond that of her first sketch.
The final two stories, "The Introduction" and "Ancestors", were also not published in Woolf's lifetime, so presumably should be considered in the same way, as non-final sketches.
"The New Dress", written in 1924 but not published until 1927, after the novel, is thereby the closest to a final work and is a wonderfully drawn piece of a guest at Mrs Dalloway's party (Mabel Waring, mentioned in passing in the novel), very anxious and self-conscious of how she, and the new, but very old-fashioned, dress she had made for occasion, are perceived by others.
She strained and strained (standing in front of the looking-glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer. (Envy and spite, the most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)
"The Introduction" (c. Spring 1925) focuses on one of the guests at the part, Lily Everit, at her first party as an adult, as Mrs Dalloway seeks to introduce her to the gathering.
‘Come and let me introduce you,� and there Mrs Dalloway hesitated, and then remembering that Lily was the clever one who read poetry, looked about for some young man, some young man just down from Oxford, who would have read everything and would talk about himself. And holding Lily Everit’s hand she led her towards a group where there were young people talking.
Lily Everit hung back a little, might have been in the wake of a steamer; felt as Mrs Dalloway led her on, that it was now going to happen; that nothing could prevent it, or save her (and she only wanted it to be over now) from being flung into a whirlpool where either she would perish or be saved.
She introduces her to a young man, a fellow fan of Shelley, but Lily's view of him, and society in general, is jolted as she catches him casually killing a fly by ripping off its wings, a wonderful defining moment making this a powerful story.
"Ancestors" (May 1925) centres on Mrs Valliance who while talking to another guest, compares him, and the party and indeed London generally, unfavourably to her Scottish upbringing:
Mrs Vallance, as she replied to Jack Renshaw who had made that rather silly remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, wished that she could make him understand somehow what became every moment more obvious at a party like this, that if her father had been alive people would have realised how foolish, how wicked—no, not so much wicked as silly and ugly—how, compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial. How very different his mind was, and his life; and her mother, and how differently, entirely differently she herself had been brought up.
"The Man Who Loved His Kind" has Richard Dalloway bump into an old school friend, Pricket Ellis, he has not seen for 20 years and invite him to the party (Wouldn't he drop in that evening ... one or two people were coming.). But Prickett Ellis doesn't find the party to his taste - It was the sort of thing that made his gorge rise. Think of grown up, responsible men and women doing this every night of their lives! ... he glared ever more severely at these people, overdressed, cynical and pompous, whereas his one and only extravagance was his little yacht on the Norfolk Broads. He sees himself as a man of the people, who loves his own kind, but when he tries to explain this to one of the guests she finds him equally self-obsessed.
"Together and Apart" (early 1925) has Mrs Dalloway introduce two guests, Miss Anning and Roderick Serle, who discover a shared link in Canterbury, where each spent some of their most intense moments, but one that illuminates their very different personalities:
‘Yes, I know Canterbury,� he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought, often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two � he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from the society of and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write.
"A Summing Up" has Mr Bertram Pritchard and Mrs Latham, leaving the party for the peace of the garden. And while he chunters on, superficially, she retreats into her inner, rather more philsophical, musings:
Written down what he said would be incredible—not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.
Sasha Latham would be thinking while he chattered on about his tour in Devonshire, about inns and landladies, about Eddie and Freddie, about cows and night travelling, about cream and stars, about continental railways and Bradshaw, catching cod, catching cold, influenza, rheumatism and Keats—she was thinking of him in the abstract as a person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in the guise that was different from what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove it.
Overall, a great companion volume to the brilliant novel, perhaps not so convincing stand alone but 4 stars as a companion piece.
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