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Express Tribune
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
A 100 years on, Mrs Dalloway continues to walk
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved. Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
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.
Express Tribune
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved.
Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Mrs Dalloway turns 100 — here's why Virginia Woolf's novel is a masterpiece
I first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a teenager and remember a feeling of being borne along by a stream of shimmering beauty, although my understanding was limited. I have returned to the novel many times since and its emotional resonance has changed with each reading. The novel — published in May 1925 by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, and celebrating its centenary this year — opens with the line 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself' and gives us Clarissa, walking in London on a morning in June and planning her party. What began as a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (in which Clarissa buys gloves, not flowers), became Woolf's modernist masterpiece and a radical reinvention of the writing of
Hindustan Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Delhiwale: This way to Mohalla Niyaryan, part 2
The narrow street is splintered into narrower cul-de-sacs. One ends into a wall. The wall has a door. The door opens into a vestibule. The vestibule opens into a courtyard, showing rooms beyond. This particular residence isn't real. It exists in Ahmad Ali's Twilight in Delhi. The novel is set in Mohalla Niyaryan, which is real. This Old Delhi street lies behind GB Road's red light district, crammed with houses, chai khanas, roti bakeries, and very many stalls of all kinds. One of these stalls specialises in repairing mobile phones. The proprietor, the justly named Asif Mobile Wale, is a dweller of this very street, but he had never before heard of the novel that put his gali on the pedestal of world-class literary fiction. Twilight in Delhi was published in England in 1940 by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. After patiently hearing out the novel's synopsis, Asif Mobile Wale's face lights up. 'I know the house!' He swiftly gives directions to the address. Moments later, on knocking at the house, women's voices are heard. The tall arched door opens slightly, revealing a man in white kurta-pajamas. The house has nothing to do with any novel, he says, shutting the door. Apologetic about the expedition's failure, Asif Mobile Wale offers tea-stall chai as consolation. Perhaps it is vain to seek in reality a place anchored in literature. This evening, as if to emphasise the point, Mohalla Niyaryan seems disconnected from Ahmad Ali's novel, wholeheartedly immersed into the minutiae of its current three-dimensional existence. The busy cooks at Abdul Aziz Bawarchi, the alert client at Sajid Tailor, the resigned goat tethered to Rafi Medicos, the hurried passersby — one with a pigeon on his shoulder. Mohalla Niyaryan is changing fast, Asif Mobile Wale says cheerily, waving his chai glass towards a construction site. 'A time was when our gali had no tall building, and we could see all the way to the pahari of Paharganj.' The chitchat gradually returns to Twilight in Delhi. The mobile phone repairer wonders at the fact that the author of such an iconic Delhi novel moved to Pakistan following the partition. 'During the batwara, my dada refused to desert the Mohalla Niyaryan of his dada-pardada.' Meanwhile, the evening has ended, but Mohalla Niyaryan's hectic nightlife is refusing to fade. In that, it is the opposite of the night life in Twilight's Mohalla Niyaryan, where, per the novel's last line, 'night came striding fast, bringing silence in its train, and covered up the empires of the world in its blanket of darkness and gloom…'
