The joy of Mrs Dalloway, 100 years on

Sally Bayley on what she takes away from Woolf's novel a century later

The working title of Mrs Dalloway was The Hours, and it originated from two short stories: ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the unfinished ‘The Prime Minister’

If I had to vouch for the sustaining appeal of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway 100 years on, I would emphasise its capacity to produce happiness, joy even, from a set of intensely felt present tense moments. And so despite everything — war, illness, traumatic death, mental breakdown, failed friendships and marriages, the ceaseless loss of human existence — Mrs. Dalloway is a joyful novel, celebrating as it does the end of the Great War in Europe and the end of a period of illness in the life of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, aged 50, who is preparing for a party. Woolf’s focus is a simple and radiant one: the recognition of moments of acute happiness, joy at being alive, despite the terrible scars of war. And yet war is most certainly still with us in the figure of Septimus Smith who sits out with his anguished wife in Regent’s Park wrestling with his demons; Smith the traumatised soldier whose sees his friend Evans explode to smithereens from behind every park bush. Smith’s fate is unforgettable because war is a permanent fact of human history; but it is Clarissa’s indomitable mood which shapes this novel. Her commitment to life, to living, to the flow of existence.

‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ she declares at the prospect of a day full of enjoyment; before we are indeed plunged into Mrs. Dalloway’s private world of past and present selves and events. For this is a novel of commemoration and remembrance of chiefly private moments; and Clarissa’s party is an attempt to give public commemoration to a set of private forms. As readers, we are asked to build upon these moments as though they were our own. To collaborate in an atmosphere of trust and intimacy; a subterranean world of feelings and evaluations of felt experience, as if feelings and experiences were somehow a set of exquisite objects we must sort though. Much of this is happy and uplifting work because Mrs. Dalloway sustains herself with chiefly happy reflections. She eschews those in a more despondent mood: the embittered seamstress, Miss Kilman, brought low by poverty and her rigid religion; and the agitating Peter Walsh who won’t relinquish the past, who simply won’t enjoy.

For enjoyment, we learn, is central to Clarissa’s personality, a fact noted by Peter Walsh, her former suitor, as he too sits out in Regents Park — in close proximity to Septimus but in an entirely different history — reflecting upon his reunion with Clarissa on this day in June. Years have passed and they have both reached their early fifties. Peter, who Clarissa might once have married had things gone differently; had he been different; more agreeable, more spur of the moment:

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy . . . She enjoyed practically everything. It you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.

If I had to have a go at summarising Mrs. Dalloway’s method for living, which is the ethos of the entire novel, it might go something like this: Life is a series of passing moments and it is impossible to note all of them, but each, potentially, might flower into something extraordinary; a revelation, a moment of ripening knowledge. So be sure to honour this moment for what it can bring you both now and in the future because you will find yourself recalling your past and it will take imagination and courage to recall what it is you love, who you love and how. And there will always be deviations and interruptions; moments and selves you cannot assimilate, and you will not comprehend, as you try to assemble an authentic version of yourself for posterity.