-- Written by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).

-- Published 100 years ago.

-- Set over the course of a single day -- namely, a Wednesday in the middle of June, in the year 1923 -- and punctuated by the chimes of Big Ben, an audible record of the passage of time.

-- Chosen, therefore, by Henry Eliot as a book we would read in a day. The day being Wednesday 18 June. Great idea. I like the different time frames he suggests for his read-alongs. We're reading Anna Karenina in the original instalments, so we won't finish until next year. Ditto The Old Curiosity Shop. I couldn't quite manage the one-day dash for Under the Volcano. But I wrote 18 June into my calendar, and was looking forward to it. As an aside, Leonard and Virginia read James Joyce's Ulysses in 1918, and considered publishing it through their Hogarth Press. This didn't happen, as we know, but the fact that Ulysses runs throughout a single day in another capital city might have given Woolf the idea for Mrs Dalloway. (I must read Ulysses... I must just do it... I don't think you could pack reading that into a day, though...)

I'd read Mrs Dalloway once before, with little effect, as I noted here. It just kind of washed over me.

This time, it was a very different story...

***

I'm not in the same time zone as the source of the read-along. So I thought I'd start the programme at 1000 Malaysia time (as per the group's schedule), and then join in with the chat as the UK came onstream (in what was late afternoon for me).

It started with farce. An impromptu breakfast gathering could be accommodated. I could still get back in time after that. But as I went in through our front door, I could already hear the hammering from the resuscitated renovation upstairs... So I went straight back out again. By the time I'd secured a Grab, installed myself in cafe number 1, and had a conversation with a former colleague to arrange to meet up the following day, I was already running behind.


Wandering me

But I persisted. Woolf is famous for her highly effective use of the stream-of-consciousness approach. And with this kind of writing, it's good, I think, to just plunge in, not think too much, and power on. You don't get bogged down that way.

And I think it's fair to say that Woolf's technique has moved on from her experiments in Jacob's Room. Whereas I found that narrative a little jagged, Mrs Dalloway is as smooth as silk. We effortlessly change perspectives, look from different angles at the same event, cover the same geographic ground with different eyes. It flows beautifully.

When the chat started, it was a nice surprise to find that Henry was walking us -- pretty much in real-time -- around the sites of the novel. He offered us videos, interpretation, and context, while ordinary punters such as I chipped in with comments. Really a fantastic example of how these online book groups can work.

The time difference meant that I had to bow out around their lunchtime, but I reviewed all the rest of the videos and comments yesterday, and was really happy to have been part of it all.


By Morris Beja

***

The combination of fast reading, corporate reading, and pictorial background really transformed the book, and I was much better able, by the end, to appreciate what a total gem it is, and how exquisitely Woolf writes.

The story is simple. We follow Clarissa Dalloway, a comfortably-off, 50-something London socialite, as she prepares for another of her parties that evening. Along a parallel track, we follow Septimus Warren Smith, who has returned from World War I with severe mental illness. As we swoop in and out, between the past and the present, we learn about their backstories, and the characters associated with them.

I often feel, when I read a novel that moves me, that, yes, it's hard being a human being... We're so frail. Even the strongest among us, and apparently the most prosperous, still struggle with self-doubt, and with those inevitable companions on the human road, aging and death. And there are vast multitudes whose struggles are so much more visceral.

From Woolf's introduction to the 1928 US edition, we learn that she originally envisaged that Mrs Dalloway would kill herself (or at least die) at the end of the party for which she has been preparing all day. Actually, that doesn't happen. It's Septimus -- having been told by one doctor that there's nothing wrong with him, and by another that the only way forward is a rest-cure in the country ("rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months' rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve") -- who hurls himself out of a window onto the lethally ubiquitous London railings beneath.

Mrs Dalloway lives on. But her stream of thought is a constant wavering between moments of utter joy ("what she liked was simply life") and intimations of mortality ("that one day should follow another... it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant...").

The juxtaposition is at its most acute when news of Septimus's suicide explodes into her party (via Sir William, the second physician -- "a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil"). She understands the fear that drove Septimus's decision: "Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. But that young man had killed himself."

But she clings to life: "No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank."


Virginia Woolf in 1912 (painted by her sister, Vanessa Bell)

Maria Popova comments: "What makes you and the child you were the same person -- what makes a self -- is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.

"Virginia Woolf... called these beads 'moments of being' -- the 'scaffolding in the background' of life, 'invisible and silent' yet shaping the foreground of experience: our relationship to other people, our response to events, the things we make with our hands and our minds in our daily living. The most intensely felt of these moments, she believed, 'have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence'; we don’t call them to memory -- they call us into being. They are the antipode of what she called 'non-being' -- the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living...

"It is through her protagonist in Mrs Dalloway that Woolf best captures these luminous building blocks of personhood:

"These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our best listening device for hearing the soul beneath the self -- the soul that is little more than the quality of attention we pay to being alive."

Moments of being...

The way Mrs Dalloway examines the struggle between the light and the dark was, for me, the most precious thing about the book. And, of course, it's made all the more poignant because we know that Woolf herself was ultimately unable to keep the balance, and eventually drowned herself in the River Ouse.

***

Recurring throughout the pages we have a triangle connecting Clarissa, Richard (the man she eventually married), and Peter (the man whose proposal she rejected, and who has just arrived back after a long period in India). There are no simple answers to the obvious question: Did she choose the right man?

Various characters tell us how passionately Peter had loved Clarissa, and he certainly struggles to forget her. It's her original rejection that meant he had "gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things".


Peter, tangled up with his messes and his love life in India, thinks: "If he did retire, that's what he'd do -- write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian"

But Peter makes Clarissa feel bad about herself. She's painfully aware of his criticism, and feels acutely that he finds her superficial, snobbish, uninformed. Which in many ways she is... Peter also recognizes her qualities, though. After her rejection, his meetings with her have been brief and infrequent -- but "the effect of them on his life was immeasurable... She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known."

The thing is, what Clarissa does, she does well. And that has to carry weight. But she doesn't always recognize it. Self-doubting, aging, sometimes wondering about what might have been with Peter, and remembering Sally Seton, whose kiss had offered her "the most exquisite moment of her whole life" -- in the midst of all this, she is grateful for the solidity of Richard.

Richard is a bit of a duffer, but you can't help but feel sorry for him too, all corseted up in his Englishness and his restraint. He buys his wife flowers, and determines to say "straight out in so many words (whatever she might think of him), holding out his flowers, 'I love you.' Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s shy... It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought... Here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this he thought."

But now it's three o'clock. Richard arrives with his flowers. "He was holding out flowers -- roses, red and white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)... She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa."

Oh, Richard...


The first edition cover, also designed by Vanessa Bell

His inhibition is not only emotionally distressing; it's also symbolic of a buttoned-up era that was on the cusp of passing away.

The age... Aeroplanes skywriting advertisements; the introduction of British Summer Time; young people who could gad about, but "could not talk"; "that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation" that Peter had seen as immovable in his youth; those five years (1918-23) that he suspects had been "somehow very important" -- these are just some of the many references to times a-changing.

Alex Zwerdling always seems to have useful things to say about Woolf, and in this article he picks up the author's stated intention in writing Mrs Dalloway: "I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense."

In her portraits of a broad spread of characters strung out along the social spectrum, he argues, she shows us a class that is failing to adapt to the change that is waiting in the wings and a class that stands ready to do things differently. The pivot of this spectrum is Clarissa, who herself has both a conformist and a rebellious side.

Zwerdling closes his article like this: "Mrs Dalloway captures a moment in which the domination of the ideal of rigid self-control began to seem oppressive rather than admirable. In illuminating the price the characters in her novel have had to pay to live under the sway of this ideal, Woolf is not only fulfilling her ambition 'to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense,' but contributing indirectly to its replacement by one less hostile to the buried life of feeling in every human being."

***

All in all, this was a wonderful book, and a wonderful reading experience. I'm wondering about doing another re-read in the middle of June next year. If I'm spared...