Dear Dallowday readers,

I’m really looking forward to our real-time read-along of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway later this month, to mark the novel’s centenary year. We’ll be reading from 10am until 10pm (with breaks) on Wednesday 18th June. All the details are here.

To set the scene, here is a little about Virginia Woolf’s life and how she came to write Mrs Dalloway.

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Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in South Kensington, London, in 1882. For the first thirteen years of her life, her family spent long happy summer holidays in St Ives, Cornwall.

But then her beloved mother died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and her older stepsister, Stella, died two years later. Her father, the writer and lexicographer Leslie Stephen, died in 1904 and her favourite brother, Thoby, succumbed to typhoid fever in 1906.

She described herself as a ‘broken chrysalis’ during this ‘decade of deaths’ and began to experience mental breakdowns and thoughts of suicide, which haunted her throughout her life.

In 1904, she moved with her sister Vanessa to the bohemian district of Bloomsbury in central London, where she became involved with a group of artists and writers now known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. These included Clive Bell, Vanessa’s future husband; Lytton Strachey; and Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912.

The members of the Bloomsbury Group were influenced by the philosopher G. E. Moore, who wrote that the prime objects in life were ‘love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge’. They were a sexually tolerant group about whom Dorothy Parker is said to have quipped, ‘they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press together in 1917 and published works by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield and the first English translations of Freud, as well as Woolf’s own experimental novels, which soon established her as a leading proponent of modernism in fiction.

In 1918, they read James Joyce’s Ulysses and considered it for publication at the Hogarth Press. In the end they declined, but Joyce’s modernist novel, set over the course of a single day, may have planted the idea for Mrs Dalloway, which employs similarly fluid inner monologues and is set in a capital city over the course of a single day in mid-June.

More directly, however, the novel grew out of two of Woolf’s short stories: the unfinished ‘The Prime Minister’ (October 1922) and ‘Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street’ (The Dial, July 1923). You can read the latter in the sequence of seven short stories published as Mrs Dalloway’s Party.

On 14 October 1922, Woolf wrote in her diary:

Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side – something like that. Septimus Smith? – is that a good name?

Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was published by the Hogarth Press on 14 May 1925, with a cover designed by Vanessa Bell.

In August that year, Woolf suffered a nervous collapse at Vanessa’s Sussex home, Charleston, one of several recurrences of her illness. Nonetheless, she went on to write more masterpieces: To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937).

In 1941, after completing the manuscript of her final novel, Between the Acts, Woolf felt herself descending into depression again.

Dreading another onset of her illness, she pocketed a large stone and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near Monk’s House, her home in Sussex.

Today she is regarded as a seminal figure of twentieth-century literature and an inspirational feminist. Her most beloved book is Mrs Dalloway.

To finish, a recommendation – on 13 May this year (a day before the novel’s 100th anniversary), Manchester University Press published a rather brilliant ‘biography’ of Mrs Dalloway by Mark Hussey, General Editor of the Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf.

Here’s what MUP say about it:

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel’s writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf’s process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel’s remarkable legacy to the present day.

Buy Mrs Dalloway Biography (UK)

Buy Mrs Dalloway Biography (US)

Full disclosure – MUP kindly sent me a complimentary copy of Hussey’s book – and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far.

It’s an excellent extended introduction to the novel. I particularly enjoyed Hussey’s summary of Woolf’s self-effacing introduction to the 1928 American edition:

Woolf used her introduction for the Modern Library edition of Mrs Dalloway to argue that introductions are of little use. Once a novel is published ‘it ceases to be the property of the author’ and belongs entirely to readers. Even were a reader to know a lot about a writer’s life, she continued, the question of ‘what was relevant and what not’ to a particular work would still need to be decided. She casually throws out a scrap of possibly interesting information: that ‘in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party’.

The endpapers of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel feature a beautiful map of the novel’s locations, drawn by Morris Beja in 1977 for the Virginia Woolf Miscellany:

I look forward to reading the novel itself – in real-time – with you next month!

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