The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowers
A century ago, writer Virginia Woolf handed readers a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, and in doing so, rewrote the possibilities of fiction. Not with grand events, but with the quiet rhythms of a woman's heart. 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,' and as she set out from her elite Westminster home, the simple act became an existential event, an examination of her interior life, her longing and loneliness and the way she shrinks and expands with the roles society has placed upon her. Through the narrative, Woolf gave depth to what was so peremptorily dismissed in reality as well as in fiction at the time — the lives of girls and women — and refused to look away.
In an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier. She challenged the primacy of plot with a stream of consciousness that flowed unapologetically through doubt, memory, and fragmented desire. In Mrs Dalloway, time bent and buckled to accommodate emotion; in A Room of One's Own (1929), she declared space and income the foundations for female creativity. These were radical acts of reclamation. She wrote with the full force of a mind that refused to compartmentalise intellect and emotion, and made room for a new language for both feminism and fiction.
A century and many movements for women's rights later, the questions Mrs Dalloway raised continues to be relevant still: How do women stitch meaning into days that ask them to be beautiful, dutiful, but not necessarily whole? How do women live truthfully in a world that so often mistakes performance for presence? In an age of curated selves and constant noise, Mrs Dalloway pulls people back to the politics of thought, the necessity of empathy. Woolf's work endures not simply because it was ahead of its time, but because it continues to meet each generation exactly where they are — searching, unsettled, and yearning for more.
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Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Indian Express
Mrs Dalloway at 100: Virginia Woolf's forgotten India connection
Virginia Woolf's classic novel Mrs Dalloway was published on May 14, 1925, and its centenary is being celebrated all over the Anglophone literary world. This newspaper too carried a laudatory editorial on the book, 'Mrs Dalloway Turns 100,' as well as a quotation of the day from a more mystical novel of Woolf's, The Waves (1931): 'I am rooted, but I flow.' (IE, May 15). But hardly anyone has noted the multiple connections between this novel and its author and India. These links are often explicit but sometimes indirect and counter-factual or, so to say, counter-fictional. The heroine Clarissa Dalloway lives in Westminster in the privileged heart of London in the shadow of the Big Ben, for she had three decades ago chosen to marry Richard Dalloway who is now an important Tory M.P. Had she not married this dull-though-suitable boy but her far more ardent suitor Peter Walsh, she would have become Mrs Walsh, gone off to India as an ICS officer's wife, and probably become a benign sympathetic mem sahib, just as Peter is a benevolent and innovative ruler. As if to rub in the vital mistake she then made, Peter Walsh now turns up in London, calls on Clarissa, and she, at the age of 52, feels 'like a virgin, … so shy,' and quietly wipes a tear; she finds him still 'perfectly enchanting.' She says in her mind, 'Take me with you,' and seems to want him even more keenly after he tells her that he is in love with a young woman in India. Just because Peter had gone off to India, his friends in London think him to be a failure. As he now walks around London, he stops to look at the new cars on display in a shop but finds his own face staring back at him in the plate-glass shop-window, and has a moment of self-reflection both literally and metaphorically: 'And there he was, this fortunate man, himself…All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone — … all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about.' Clarissa Dalloway here may seem to be in some ways like the young Virginia herself. The man she married, Leonard Woolf, had served in the Ceylon Civil Service from 1904 to 1911 and, on coming home on leave, had married Virginia and resigned from the service. This was after Lytton Strachey, his close friend from their student days at Cambridge, had strongly urged Leonard to marry her. Lytton had wanted to be a Cambridge don and had written a fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings. He came from a family of distinguished 'India hands,' one of whom had served as the Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces and another as a High Court Judge. Even after all the recent re-naming, there is still a Strachey Hall at the Aligarh Muslim University, a Strachey Bridge in Agra, and Strachey Roads in Prayagraj, Howrah and Asansol. In the novel, this long Indian lineage is transferred to Peter Walsh, who is a descendant of 'three generations' of high British administrators of India. In contrast with this pedigreed world, Leonard Woolf, with his deep first-hand disillusionment with imperialism, had become a committed campaigner of the Labour Party and the long-term secretary of its Imperial Advisory Committee. It must have been inputs from Leonard that made Mrs Dalloway resonate with the expectation that the Labour Party would soon come to power, as indeed it did in 1924, the year after the novel is set. Peter goes to Clarissa's grand party, which forms the climax of the novel, planning to ask Richard Dalloway 'what they were doing in India – the conservative duffers.' When the Prime Minister arrives at the party, he soon closets himself in a small room with Lady Bruton, an arch-conservative political busybody, to seek confidentially her views on India, rather than asking someone like Peter. In Woolf's most lyrical and introspective novel, The Waves, she created a set of six young friends of whom the most gifted and attractive, Percival, goes to India, falls off a horse, and dies. My Ph D supervisor, a humorous man named Frank W Bradbrook, joked once that Woolf treats India as a dumping ground for the characters she no longer needs, and it is true that she seems to keep India largely at bay and off-stage. Historically, the Indian Empire constituted the very ground on which the privileged upper classes of England trod. But the Bloomsbury group disavowed their forefathers, the 'Eminent Victorians', as Lytton Strachey ironically called them in the title of his debunking book. And in doing so, Virginia Woolf and her friends also relegated the Raj to the shadows from which it could be glimpsed only fleetingly and obliquely now and then. In June 1923, when Mrs Dalloway is set, Gandhi had been in jail for over a year on the charge of sedition, but one would never guess that from reading Mrs Dalloway. The writer taught English at Delhi University
Indian Express
15-05-2025
- Indian Express
The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowers
A century ago, writer Virginia Woolf handed readers a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, and in doing so, rewrote the possibilities of fiction. Not with grand events, but with the quiet rhythms of a woman's heart. 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,' and as she set out from her elite Westminster home, the simple act became an existential event, an examination of her interior life, her longing and loneliness and the way she shrinks and expands with the roles society has placed upon her. Through the narrative, Woolf gave depth to what was so peremptorily dismissed in reality as well as in fiction at the time — the lives of girls and women — and refused to look away. In an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier. She challenged the primacy of plot with a stream of consciousness that flowed unapologetically through doubt, memory, and fragmented desire. In Mrs Dalloway, time bent and buckled to accommodate emotion; in A Room of One's Own (1929), she declared space and income the foundations for female creativity. These were radical acts of reclamation. She wrote with the full force of a mind that refused to compartmentalise intellect and emotion, and made room for a new language for both feminism and fiction. A century and many movements for women's rights later, the questions Mrs Dalloway raised continues to be relevant still: How do women stitch meaning into days that ask them to be beautiful, dutiful, but not necessarily whole? How do women live truthfully in a world that so often mistakes performance for presence? In an age of curated selves and constant noise, Mrs Dalloway pulls people back to the politics of thought, the necessity of empathy. Woolf's work endures not simply because it was ahead of its time, but because it continues to meet each generation exactly where they are — searching, unsettled, and yearning for more.
