Mrs Dalloway
A day of party preparations, and a veteran the doctors cannot hear. The earliest sustained account of shell shock in fiction.
But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life
Two lives cross a single June day in London without ever meeting. Clarissa Dalloway moves through errands and memories toward the party she will host that evening; Septimus Warren Smith, back from the war, sits in the park with his wife while the day turns unbearable. Woolf keeps the narration close to each mind, letting the hours gather sensation, recollection and dread inside one continuous consciousness.
For a clinician the novel is precise about how care can fail. Dr Holmes hears nervous exhaustion and prescribes distraction; Sir William Bradshaw, smooth and certain, hears a case to be managed and calls it proportion. Neither reaches the man in front of him, and Septimus's flattened feeling and mounting terror go unread. Suicide enters the day as a real possibility rather than a plot point, and Woolf holds it with steadiness. Clarissa, hearing of a stranger's death at her party, feels the two lives briefly touch.
About the author
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941) was an English modernist writer known for her attention to interior consciousness and the movement of time. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both of which trace the inner lives of their characters across the hours and years. A central figure of the Bloomsbury group, she wrote fiction, essays and criticism. With her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her novels.
Details
- 1925