Dalloway is definitely worth reading – both on its own merits and as a way into American novelist Michael Cunningham’s 1998 retelling of it in The Hours. These two worlds – that of the privileged, moneyed class and that of the barely surviving veterans, the fodder for the aristocracy’s war – weave in and out of each other’s lives. Woolf’s ability to pull Clarissa Dalloway together with Septimus Warren Smith is nothing short of miraculous. They are very nearly the hobbling dead, passing time in a twilight evening. As Septimus’s story makes abundantly clear, Septimus and his fellow veterans are not the walking wounded. But Septimus won’t be soothed – just as Woolf seems to be saying that London, Europe, indeed the entire world won’t be soothed. His Italian wife, Lucrezia, takes him on quiet walks in London parks and tries to soothe him. Running parallel to Clarissa, Sally, Peter, and Richard’s story is the plotline belonging to Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran. For this is London, 1923, post-World War I, a devastated London trying to pick up its bombed-out shards and rebuild itself.

In this modernist novel, all time is present at once, and as Clarissa, Sally, and Peter meet at the dinner party, they’re each – individually – transported three decades into the past, reliving the scintillating and very nearly risqué time at the country estate of Bourton when Clarissa kissed Sally, broke Peter’s heart, and met her future husband, Richard Dalloway.Īnd yet there is even more seething underneath the surface of these upper-middle-class concerns. Old bonds as well as old rifts and hurts swirl through the party as Clarissa Dalloway confronts Sally Seton (with whom she’d had a flirtation in her youth) and Peter Walsh (whose marriage proposal she had rejected in that same youth).

Dalloway, is graceful and poised, like her title character, ever one to have things “just so.” Her dinner party – toward which the whole novel rushes – is sumptuous, elegant, and in every possible way, “just so.”īut of course, there’s much more here than meets the eye. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Has there ever been a more graceful first line of a novel than that? Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf