Customer Reviews

Mrs. Dalloway

5 star:		(95)
4 star:		(43)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Although the time covered in this complex novel is only one day, Virginia Woolf, through her genius, manages to cover a lifetime unraveling and exposing the mysteries of the human personality.

The central character of the novel is the delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English gentlewoman who provides the perfect contrast to another of the book's characters, Septimus Warren Smith, an ex-soldier whose world is disintegrating into chaos. Although Clarissa and Septimus never meet, it is through the interweaving of each one's story into a gossamer whole that Woolf works her genius.

The book is set on a June day in 1923, as Clarissa prepares for a party that evening. Unfolding events trigger memories and recollections of her past, and Woolf offers these bits and pieces to the reader who must then construct the psychological and emotional makeup of Clarissa Dalloway in his own mind. We also learn much about Clarissa through the thoughts of other characters, such as her one-time lover, Peter Walsh, her friend, Sally Seton, her husband, Richard and her daughter Elizabeth.

It is Septimus Warren Smith, however, driven to the brink of insanity by the war, an insanity that even his wife's tender ministrations cannot cure, who acts as Clarissa's societal antithesis and serves to divide her world into the "then" and the "now."

In this extremely complex and character-driven novel, Woolf offers her readers a challenge. The novel is not separated into chapters; almost all of the action occurs in the thoughts and reminiscences of the characters and the reader must piece together the story from the random bits and pieces of information each character provides. The complexity of the characters may add to the frustration because Woolf makes it difficult for the reader to receive any single dominant impression of any one of them. This, however, forms the essence of the novel and displays the genius of Woolf: It is impossible to describe any human being in a simple phrase or collection of adjectives. We are many things to many people, all of them somewhat different, none of them the same, just as we are many things to ourselves.

Throughout the book, the reader is constantly called upon to compare and contrast Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway, the two significant love interests in Clarissa Dalloway's life. Compared to Peter, an adventurer, Richard Dalloway appears more than a bit reserved and dour. But, readers must constantly question this view of Richard as his personality seems to alter with his altering relationships.

Intimacy, particularly emotional intimacy, and the preservation of one's uniqueness are two of Woolf's continuing themes. We find that Clarissa married Richard, in part, to preserve her sense of self; Peter would have demanded far more of her than she was, perhaps, willing to give. Here, Clarissa and Septimus, so outwardly different, would find they share much in common. While Clarissa feels threatened by her daughter's tenacious tutor, Miss Kilman, as well as by Peter, Septimus feels threatened by his doctor. Each feels the others are asking too much. Septimus and Clarissa even agree on the subject of death: "There is no death," Septimus declares, while Clarissa, the atheist, secretly believes that bits and pieces of her will remain intact forever.

Although some characters in this book may, at first, appear to be one-dimensional, we soon learn that all are extraordinarily complex. There is Sally, impulsive yet considerate; Richard, bashful yet timid; Peter inhibited yet adventurous; Septimus, insane yet credible. And Clarissa? She is all of these things and more.

It is, however, Woolf's torrential stream-of-consciousness prose that makes this novel a true masterpiece. Even those who find the plot of little interest will be drawn in by the exquisiteness of Woolf's language. This is a complex, character study in the fullest sense of the word, one with no easy answers, for Woolf, in the end seems to be telling us that perhaps, at our essence, we are all unknowable, even to ourselves.

Any young aspiring writer should compare Woolf's early work, such as Night and Day to something like Mrs. Dalloway. The transformation in narrative strength is incredible. I think Woolf found her voice when she gave up on traditional technique and focused on vivid imagery, poetic language, and really getting into the souuls of her characters.

Her views on love in this boook are heartbreaking. Love serves as mere convenience, romance is just an illusion. 9 times out of 10 people choose safety. Pretty cynical viewpoint, but she lived during the days of a crumbling Empire and wrote about it beautifully. She really achieved her greatest literary power later on in life.

Also, this book studies insanity and the doctors who are impotent to help. I'm sure woolf would have the same view in today's heavily medicated society.

This book is not for the faint of heart. She does not hide characters emotions, but tends to dwelon their weaknesses. The final party scene is brilliant. If you like this book, read To The Lighthouse, which is equally brilliant.

It's not really fair to judge this book or its author by today's standards, but damn, this is a hard read. I'd read it about 20 years ago and recall struggling with the endless sentences and the rambling explorations of Mrs. Dalloway's interior thoughts, her every little fleeting idea, and the tiny events of the day in her life which this book chronicles.
Then of course when The Hours was published, I rummaged around in the bookshelf, found it, and read it again.
And then the movie came out with that wonderful cast of characters, and, well, I had to read it a third time. And I'll say this: it takes more than a single reading to harvest all the gems from this dense prose. Mrs. Dalloway grew on me with the passage of time and with three careful readings. The studied explorations into past and present, men and women, women and other women, society and the family, love and regret...it's a lot to take on in what is really a pretty small book - and only someone of Woolf's talents and brilliance could have made so much of so little.
Highly recommended, but I'm sorry - you'll probably have to read it more than once to extract every single little diamond chip.

On a single day in June, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for the party she is giving that evening. Septimus Warren Smith struggles with mental illness as a result of his experiences in WWI. Using stream-of-consciousness technique Virginia Woolf explores the thoughts, emotions and sensations of these two characters and others connected with them. Past and present commingle in her characters' minds and this merging of past history and present moment allows for much richer presentation of the characters and their universe than the plot would suggest.

The chief pleasures of the book are the vivid, evocative, poetic language, and Woolf's gift for inner dialogue - the stories characters tell themselves - which in turn reveals them to us.

How good is the book? I "Mrs. Dalloway" can be found on many lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century, one of Virginia Woolf's major achievements. More often than not, it's considered her best work after "To the Lighthouse." Personally, I loved the book, and it led me to start reading her other books and to the biographies. The practical question is not whether this is a good book - it is arguably a great book. The question is whether it is for you.

The book is unapologetically literary, which means that if you don't find language a genuine pleasure, you probably won't enjoy it. For those who do, the rich, imaginative language is the reason for reading. There is little in the way of conventional suspense to keep one turning the pages. The stream-of-consciousness style is demanding, and it requires an attentive reader. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the difficulties. The action of the book is relatively easy to follow, and one does not need a concordance to appreciate it. In fact a good sense of the language can be had simply by reading the first few pages provided in Amazon's section, "Look Inside the Book."

I believe it was Lionel Trilling who said that if it's true that a book reads you as much as you read a book, certain books had found him at first difficult and boring, but had eventually grown friendly. "Mrs. Dalloway" found me to be -- when I first attempted to read it in high school -- a dull, even fragile creature; but with time the book made way for me in its life, and now we are rather fond acquaintances. Virginia Woolf is, of course, one of The Greats, but despite this debilitating label she is a writer whose books are addictive to any energetic and patient reader who is in love with the English language. Language is certainly not the only beauty in Woolf's work, but it is the aspect of her writing that first drew my amazed attention. She is in many ways an impressionist, a literary Monet, while we Americans are more comfortable with naturalists and expressionists, so perhaps a reader new to Woolf would need to exercise a few mind muscles which haven't had much attention paid to them, but this isnot a bad thing. And there's a good chance I'm wrong, a good chance that I'm taking my own particular weaknesses and ascribing them to the readership at large. (Oh well.) The point is this: give "Mrs. Dalloway" a chance. Go to it blind, without assumptions, with an open mind and curious heart. I think the book will find you to be a very engaging person, full of wonders and mystery.

This is a fine edition and value, including a helpful preface introducing the author and novel as well as an appendix (the "annotated" part) with explanations of terms, places, and designations for non-Londoners along with identifications of literary, political and historical allusions for readers who could use a little extra help.

Anyone who has read James Joyce's "The Dead" will recognize some of the same themes and preoccupations in "Mrs. Dalloway," which in addition evokes numerous English "comedies of manners" as well as satirical narratives about a straight-laced Victorian culture that has become an anachronism in the 1920s. The story at times resembles a Jane Austen novel, except for the absence of a "fixed" point-of-view or reliable standard by which to measure the characters, each of which has, to lesser or greater degrees, sympathetic and unsympathetic qualities and is shown from the "inside" as a mind-in-process, a consciousness-in-flux (consequently, a reader needs to be careful not to apply an overly "logical" approach, insistent upon hanging on to a single point or statement as "the truth" about a character, who is more likely to try one possibility, then another, leaving it up to the reader to infer a character's essence through careful consideration of the important meanings derived from multiple impressions).

This is not a novel for the impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, next loud, and never to be trusted to be without irony.

Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love.

Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is, despite Woolf's limiting her story to a single day (compared to Cunningham's three-generation setting), the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the earth to move from under a reader's feet: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures the world whole not to mention the life of language itself.

The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. At that moment, one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as "existential" cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls.

Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it inevitably pales alongside the vibrant novel and microcosm of life that is its source and inspiration. Virginia, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.

A day in the life portrait that centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a wife of a wealthy politician, in 1920s London. This work looks at the affects of aging, the psychological impacts of the first World War, the role of friendships, how people view the past, and the complexity of human emotions. It makes the reader question what really is important in our lives. The descriptions put you right in the world of Mrs. Dalloway.

Nobody does stream-of-consciousness like Virginia Woolf. And this book is stream-of-consciousness at its best. Definitely not an easy read, but well worth the time and effort. Read this book and you will be rewarded. If you get a chance, see the movie as well.

I must admit, I shied away from Virginial Woolf for some time, mostly due to having read "A Room of One's Own" in college. While mildly interesting, it certainly does not tap into the genius that is Virginia Woolf. So I didn't expect much when I picked up "Mrs. Dalloway." But wow, what a book. It is a direct response to James Joyce's "Ulysses" (though a bit more accessible) and runs with the same stream of consciousness style and also takes place in the space of one day. Virginia Woolf illustrates her greatness in this book and I highly recommend it. People looking to read more of her should also try "To the Lighthouse." She was a very talented and creative woman who more than held her own against the great male minds of the time and continues to impress even years after her death.

Perhaps the helpful remarks I can add to those above is that this dense little book does demand a lot of its readers. It is not a book for that airplane trip, nor is it a book for the beach. It is a book to be read amid quiet with no distractions, and only a few of us have managed to fashion such a place in our lives. If one has not, perhaps a different choice would be better.

Having said that, the stream-of-consciousness narrative is very accessible. Ms. Woolf has a knack for capturing the essence of many minor characters in very quick, brief sketches, giving the book a great deapth.

Clarissa is a more complex person than her passion for parties would indicate, complex in her sensibility and love of the beautiful, complex in those aspects of life that she has rejected. Septimus is a vivid study in madness, something which Ms. Woolf knew a great deal about. Then there is third principle character, Peter Walsh, about whom little has been said here. He is in his early fifties, was radical in his youth, a "failure" in middle life according to the estimate of the "successful," and plagued with women problems for a lifetime probably attributable to his constant love for the frigid Clarissa. Peter Walsh is a brilliant character study from the point of view of one similarly situated. Sally Seton, the only person whom Clarissa ever truly loved, is a vividly portrayed secondary character whom one runs into every day today--the aging hippie. All of these people move through a finely recreated London of that time.

I have to rate this novel a nearly perfect little gem.

I guess I came to this book through the back door -- first I read Michael Cunningham's pulitzer prize winning book The Hours (based on Mrs. Dalloway) which I LOVED, and then I decided to read the original. First off, I must say that Cunningham impressed me even more when I fully understood the references and parallels that he uses. As for Mrs. Dalloway, it is the language itself that dazzles. The plot is nothing to speak of -- it's similar to a Jane Austen book when lots of interesting and not-so-interesting people interact in their mundane lives. It's what Woolf does with the subtle interactions and her stream of conscious writing that makes this book so good. Having read maybe 6 of Woolf's works, my favorite is still To the Lighthouse. Maybe that's because Mrs. Ramsey is so much more human -- Mrs. Dalloway is always described as distant and cold. This book is a love story of sorts about how Clarissa turns down the true love of her life and instead marries a wealthy politician. Like Ulysses, the narrative jumps around the minds of various characters in their journey from morning in London when Clarissa goes to buy flours to the evening of her party. It is a bit difficult, but the language itself makes it worth the effort.