Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) (5 page)

Woolf, like her title character in
Mrs. Dalloway
, led a regulated existence in the early 1920s. Readers will note ways that the routine of Mrs. Dalloway is regulated. Her husband, Richard, brings her flowers in the early afternoon, and before departing returns with a pillow and a quilt, admonishing, “An hour's complete rest after luncheon” (117). Clarissa's response is accepting, even appreciative, but also critical. “He would go on saying ‘An hour's complete rest after luncheon' to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable, divine simplicity” (117). Woolf's husband, Leonard, played a similar role.

Virginia had married Leonard Woolf in 1912, making permanent his visit back to England from a civil service post in the colonial administration of Ceylon. An editor, essayist, and
socialist thinker, he was a fine intellectual companion and proved highly supportive of her writing career. Their decision to run their own press would give her the advantage of suiting herself, rather than the whims of publishing houses, for the remainder of her career. It also gave her a special relationship to other writers. She had the pleasure of publishing work by T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, among others. Woolf would write
Mrs. Dalloway
with Mansfield's criticisms of
Night and Day
very much in mind, and Eliot, through repeated conversations concerning
Ulysses
, would make her conscious of James Joyce as a modernist rival. Leonard Woolf's position as editor of
Nation & Athenaeum
, starting in 1923, would give her a constant outlet for her essays, though she would continue to publish in a variety of journals. These advantages came well into her marriage. Upon discovering the severity of Virginia's illness within their first few months together, Leonard had an immediate impulse to regulate where and when she would work. While some have criticized him for the particular medical advice he pursued—resulting in periods spent in rest homes, restricted social and writing time, and the decision that the couple should not have children—others regard his unflagging support as life preserving.

In 1914 Leonard settled with an ailing Virginia in Richmond. Situated south of the Thames River, this suburban location removed her from the more feverish activities and encounters of London. The Woolfs took walks regularly, sometimes visiting nearby Kew Gardens, often in the company of their current dog. When she was not ill, Woolf had a daily routine that limited her hours of writing, ensured periods of rest, and varied the sorts of work she did at different times of the day. We might find her writing for a few hours in the morning, then turning to reading in the afternoon, and perhaps retyping drafts later in the day. One variation might be the hand setting of type for the press, Woolf occasionally registered her protest against her protected
suburban life, as in this diary entry, which also acknowledges the importance of her social self:

 

But half the horror is that L. instead of being, as I gathered, sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle—my health. And I cant sacrifice his peace of mind, yet the obstacle is surely now a dead hand, which one should no longer let dominate our short years of life—oh to dwindle them out here, with all these gaps, & abbreviations! Always to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here & wait for Leonard to come in, to spend hours standing at the box of type with Margery, to wonder what its all for . . . For ever to be suburban. L. I don't think minds any of this as much as I do. But then Lord! . . . . what I owe him! What he gives me! Still, I say, surely we could get more from life than we do—isn't he too much of a Puritan, of a disciplinarian, doesn't he through birth & training accept a drastic discipline too tamely, or rather, with too Spartan a self control? There is, I suppose, a very different element in us; my social side, his intellectual side. This social side is very genuine in me. Nor do I think it reprehensible. It is a piece of jewellery I inherit from my mother—a joy in laughter, something that is stimulated, not selfishly wholly or vainly, by contact with my friends. (
Diary
2: 250)

 

She wrote this breakaway diary entry on June 28, 1923—very nearly at the time she set
Mrs. Dalloway
.

Although London was a restricted destination for Woolf during the first decade of her marriage, the countryside, and especially the rolling hills near the sea in Sussex, were within reach. Having frequented the area since their early courtship, the Woolfs in 1919 purchased Monk's House in Rodmell as their country retreat. The
Mrs. Dalloway
manuscript traveled back and
forth to Sussex, where Woolf wrote in a garden shed (shared with apples in the loft). Though its present action is set in London,
Mrs. Dalloway
goes back in memory to a country setting.

By 1924, when in the finishing stages of
Mrs. Dalloway
, Virginia was doing well enough to convince Leonard that they should again reside in London. She took the initiative to find and negotiate for a residence that would house both themselves and the Hogarth Press at 52 Tavistock Square. She recorded her love of the city, so central to her novel in progress, in her diary as she prepared to settle there again: “London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie—music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach, as it hasn't been since August 1913, when we left Cliffords Inn, for a series of catastrophes which very nearly ended my life, & would, I'm vain enough to think, have ended Leonard's” (
Diary
2: 283).

 

Connections

 

W
OOLF'S
long-restricted but much-cherished social life involved members of the Bloomsbury circle, most of whom (including Leonard) were drawn from the group of young men who had surrounded Woolf's older brother, Thoby, when he was a student at Cambridge. Now middle-aged like herself, they might come to Richmond on individual visits. They were also likely to gather at various residences in Bloomsbury, or at Virginia's or Vanessa's country homes in Sussex. Woolf's Bloomsbury friends, moving through the decades, included Vanessa's husband, the art critic Clive Bell; Vanessa's lover, the bisexual artist Duncan Grant; the artist, critic, and founder of the arts and crafts Omega Workshop Roger Fry; the biographer Lytton
Strachey, who had briefly engaged himself to Virginia, despite being a homosexual; the novelist E. M. Forster; and the noted economist John Maynard Keynes, joined by his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova (a recent addition to the group).

Woolf's love of gathering with friends would play a part in the design of
Mrs. Dalloway
, where a party provides the culmination of the day, and the plot. The double dimension of time, which flashes from middle-aged Bloomsbury friendship back to the excitement of youthful acquaintanceship, is also echoed in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Clarissa Dalloway, Richard, Peter Walsh, and Sally Seton move repeatedly in their minds from their middle-aged present, on a single day in London, to intense late-adolescent episodes experienced in the country at Bourton. Both Woolf and numerous critics have noted resources for the characters of
Mrs. Dalloway
in the Bloomsbury set. Lydia Lopokova, for example, helped Woolf imagine the cultural challenges faced by Rezia, the Italian wife of Septimus Smith in
Mrs. Dalloway
, and Rezia bears some of her gestures. In Lytton Strachey, Woolf continued to encounter the man she did not marry, sometimes reflecting on his foibles, as Clarissa does on those of Peter Walsh. Leonard for Virginia, like Richard Dalloway for Clarissa, was the more reliable choice. Such parallels are imperfect, however. Peter's personality was not at all like Strachey's, and for it she might have turned more to Clive Bell. Woolf opportunistically transplanted some of Leonard's experiences as a colonial administrator in Ceylon onto Peter as well, since Peter has just returned to London from his post in India.

Woolf had to look outside Bloomsbury for characters such as Hugh Whitbread, with his allegiance to the society of the royal court, and even for some aspects of Clarissa. Woolf had a model for Hugh in her half brother George Duckworth, who insisted that Virginia accompany him to high-society occasions.
These brought torment to Woolf's teen years, and this is reflected somewhat in the rebellion of Elizabeth Dalloway against her objectification at the Dalloways' party. Another family friend, introduced to the Stephens via their upper-class Duckworth connection, was Kitty Maxse, sometimes seen as a partial model for Clarissa. Woolf recalled Kitty's engagement, which occurred during a visit to the family's vacation house in St. Ives, when Woolf was eight years old. Woolf's diary records Kitty's death from a suspicious fall in October 1922, and expresses regret that she hadn't kept up with this “old friend.” She sets down very distinct memories of “her white hair—pink cheeks—how she sat upright—her voice—with its characteristic tones—her green blue floor—which she painted with her own hands: her earrings, her gaiety, yet melancholy; her smartness: her tears, which stayed on her cheek” (
Diary
2: 206). Woolf worried that Clarissa was a “stiff-glittering & tinsely” character and comforted herself that she could bring other characters to her support (
Diary
2: 272). Woolf could also study character types and modes of entertainment at a grand country house, Garsington, near Oxford, where Lady Ottoline Morrell entertained her own literary aristocracy. One visit brought out qualities of loathing that suggest the more troubled views of humanity expressed by Septimus Smith in
Mrs. Dalloway
:

 

But I cannot describe Garsington. Thirty seven people to tea; a bunch of young men no bigger than asparagus; walking to & fro, round & round; compliments, attentions, & then this slippery mud—which is what interests me at the moment. A loathing overcomes me of human beings—their insincerity, their vanity—A wearisome & rather defiling talk with Ott. last night is the foundation of this complaint—& then the blend in one's own mind of suavity & sweetness with contempt & bitterness. (
Diary
2: 243)

 

Also during the period of her writing
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf gained fresh insight into aristocrats through her new friend, later her lover and a significant contributor to the Hogarth Press, Vita Sackville-West.

 

Work in Progress

 

A
T WORK
on
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf strove “to foresee this book better than the others, & get the utmost out of it. I suppose I could have screwed Jacob up tighter if I had foreseen; but I had to make my path as I went” (
Diary
2: 209–10). She paced herself by setting goals for scenes to be completed in the next month or two, and planning how fiction should take turns with other tasks. “I am beginning Greek again, & must really make out some plan: today 28th [August 1922]: Mrs Dalloway finished on Sat. 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th start Chaucer: Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs D.—if she is to have a next chapter; & shall it be The Prime Minister? Which will last till the week we get back—Say Oct. 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter” (
Diary
2: 196).

Woolf's documentation of her progress in diaries, notebooks, and letters lets us share in the evolution of the novel, her sense of her own method, and her coping with the problems introduced in specific scenes. She thinks of various possible titles, including “At Home” and “The Party,” which eventually become segments of the novel. A third tentative title, “The Hours,” furnished a lasting structure recording the passage of a single day in London, and a recurrent motif of clocks rather savagely slicing out “leaden circles” of time. By early October 1922, “MD [had] branched into a book” from the original two stories. Woolf began to have the idea of creating an unusual double for
Mrs. Dalloway in the person of a young clerk, Septimus Smith, who had returned from World War I with a case of shell shock: “I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side” (
Diary
2: 207). This changed one plan, “that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” (Woolf, Introduction 11). We find Woolf negotiating her writing of the most upsetting passages, where she touched closest to her own mental struggles through the depiction of Smith. She reported to a friend, Gwen Raverat, “It was a subject that I have kept cooling in my mind until I felt I could touch it without bursting into flame all over. You can't think what a raging furnace it is still to me—madness and doctors and being forced” (
Letters 3
: 180). The difficult scenes included the “mad scene in Regent's Park,” where Septimus hallucinates the figure of his fallen commanding officer. For this she found she could write but fifty words a day (
Diary
2: 272). She races through Septimus's suicide scene, as if to protect herself. In February 1923, Woolf reports that she is deriving benefits from the reading she is doing simultaneously: “I wonder if this next lap will be influenced by Proust? I think his French language, tradition, &c, prevents that: yet his command of every resource is so extravagant that one can hardly fail to profit, & must not flinch, through cowardice” (
Diary
2: 234). She finds in the writing of fiction the “instant nourishment & well being of my entire day.”

“I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment” (
Diary
2: 213). This famous metaphorical description of Woolf's breakthrough discovery about her method in creating characters, made in the course of writing
Mrs. Dalloway
, holds many conceptual possibilities. It works on both spatial and temporal planes and among a large set of characters.
Taken moment by moment (or scene by scene), it can help us work our way into the experimental nature of this work. Woolf does not mark out chapters for us. She does insert occasional section breaks with a blank line in the text, when there is usually a change of character or scene. Interestingly, two breaks that occur in the British edition of
Mrs. Dalloway
fail to appear in the American edition, upon which this version is based (see notes for their location). As was her usual practice, Woolf marked up separate sets of proofs for the two publications, and may have worked longer, making more changes, on the British set. Whatever the number, the breaks in the text may encourage us readers to start tunneling in a new direction. Transitions between characters often occur via an experience of the present moment that they share—hearing the tone of one of the many chiming clocks, or the alarming backfire on Bond Street, or watching an airplane doing skywriting far above. These are all forms of connecting in the present moment, as called for in the “tunneling process” (
Diary
2: 272).