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Washington Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
After 100 years, there's still much to learn from ‘Mrs. Dalloway'
This year marks the centennial of the first publication of Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway.' It's truly a cause for widespread celebration, an occasion on which to honor the fact that Clarissa Dalloway is still going strong, that grateful readers are still being invited to spend a day in her company, a thrilling and heartbreaking day — June 13 — that begins with Mrs. Dalloway's decision to buy flowers for a party and that ends with the party for which the flowers have been bought.
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
Scroll.in
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Mrs Dalloway' at 100: Virginia Woolf's timeless novel is a work of pandemic fiction
Stories written by Anna Snaith, The Conversation Published on May 14 1925, the novel follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares to host a party. Anna Snaith, The Conversation
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf review: ‘one brief day in a woman's mind' – archive, 1925
5 June 1925 Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press. Pp 293. 7s 6d The earlier and very impressive novels of Mrs Woolf did not lead us to expect that as her development approached complete maturity her style would take on such a talkative character as it reveals in Mrs Dalloway. Not talkative in the garrulous tiresome sense, though; but with the dignity which always distinguished the work of her friend the late Katherine Mansfield. Indeed, the opening pages (one cannot say the opening chapter, for the book runs straight on, without any divisions) are delightfully reminiscent of Mrs Mansfield's best work, and Mrs Woolf's setting of a West End morning in June is as full of vivacious life and fresh colour as the actuality – granted, of course, fine weather and sunlight. She has aimed, moreover, at presenting the kaleidoscopic moments of a busily reminiscent mind rather than any continuous story. There is no substance to the book in the ordinary sense of plot and narrative. Clarissa Dalloway, a well-preserved woman of 50, wife of a successful politician, wakes up on the morning of an important party she has arranged for the evening, and gradually her thoughts drift to her own childhood and girlhood, to her daughter Elizabeth and the daughter's crabbed history tutor, to her husband in his younger days, and to the man who went to India instead of marrying her. That is all – one brief day in a woman's mind. The book is written with brilliant finesse, originality, and charm, and Mrs Woolf's psychological insight, if not this development in her method, enables her to retain a unique position among the women novelists of our time. By H I'AF 14 May 1925 The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. Pp305. 12s 6d 'Journalism,' writes Virginia Woolf, 'embalmed in a book is unreadable.' No one has more right to proclaim the fact than she, who has discovered how to write for the newspapers without ceasing to be an artist and how to exalt criticism into a creative adventure which, though intensely personal and provocative, is yet preserved by the finest sense of values from the quixotry of impressionism. Certainly we have seldom read a volume of essays which, by their sufficiency and freshness, insight and accomplishment, so captivate and satisfy the mind. It is the combination of brilliance and integrity which is so rare, and we will confess that until we read this volume we credited Virginia Woolf with more charm and vivacity than vision, delighted in her style for its supple simplification of complexity, but with a suspicion that her victory was more often over words than ideas. Such a misjudgment was made easier because her ideas are seldom explicit: she is so fine an artist because her thought, concentrated and effective as it is, is not starkly separated from the fluid elements of experience, from her immediate human response to the life that literature and writings too humble to rank as literature embody. It is thus that she succeeds in combining keen analysis with a synthesising humanity and can disentangle the ideas which animated an individual or a people in the very process of picturing, with a selective fidelity to detail, the objective circumstances of their lives. And being thus both exact and imaginative, her intercourse with her subjects is really that of a contemporary, and not that kind of ironic intimacy which, however stealthily, betrays a detached egotism by its tendency to exploit. This illusion of complete critical identity with her subject Virginia Woolf achieves in almost all her studies, particularly in her vivid picture of the lives of the Pastons, of Montaigne, Evelyn, Addison, and of those 'stranded ghosts' whom she delivers from the obscurity of an 'obsolete library.' It is nowhere more shiningly displayed than in her reconception of the Greek drama and the hard, sharply outlined Greek world that was its stage and dictated its emphasis, brevity, and elemental force. For here, as in her studies of Charlotte and Emily Broute and of the Russian novelists, a writer whom we had supposed to be somewhat of the self-centred and self-limited order, rather mistress of the incisive phrase than a diver in deep waters, reveals, too, an expansiveness and profundity of understanding which is so seldom served by transparency, a sense of the primitive and elemental as remarkable as her knowledge of the mannered and the eccentric.
