Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Biography & Discussion
Guide
Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, to Leslie Stephen and Julia
Duckworth Stephen. She was one of four children. Woolf was educated at home, and
even in early childhood she was a voracious reader of the books in her father's extensive
library. Her mother died in 1895, triggering the first of what would become many mental
breakdowns for Woolf. Her older sister Stella died two years later in 1897. When her
father died in 1904, Woolf suffered a second breakdown and attempted to commit suicide
by jumping out of a window. After her recovery, she published her first essays and
became a book reviewer for the prestigious Times Literary Supplement. In 1912, Virginia
married Leonard Woolf.
Woolf, her husband, her sister Vanessa, and their friends met regularly,
maintaining a liberal and intellectual atmosphere. They referred to themselves as
"Bloomsbury," after the area of London, and are known historically as the Bloomsbury
Group. Woolf suffered a third mental breakdown, but she managed to write her first
novel, The Voyage Out, during periods of health over the course of her convalescence.
The rest of her novels were published by the Hogarth Press, founded by Woolf and her
husband, which also published works by T.S. Eliot, Freud, and Katherine Mansfield.
Despite her health problems, Woolf was a prolific writer. During the 1920s, she
wrote several novels, a voluminous collection of essays, and kept a diary. Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) is considered her first great novel. The novel's stream-of-consciousness style is an
exercise in technical mastery, capturing the subjective reality of a single day in postWWI London. Woolf was clearly influenced by James Joyce's Ulysses, which portrays a
single day in Dublin in somewhat the same manner. The title character of Mrs. Dalloway,
Clarissa Dalloway, is a shallow, upper-class wife. Her narrative runs parallel to that of
Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran suffering from shell shock. Septimus and Clarissa
experience the day under very different circumstances, but together their narratives create
a powerful, textured evocation of post-war London. Beyond the individual stories of
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Clarissa and Septimus, Mrs. Dalloway presents the British Empire as an entity that had
sacrificed the lives of so many in order to preserve itself, and yet was already in decline.
There are hints at the agitation for independence in India. The Labor Party was coming to
power, and women had begun to agitate for social and political equality. Even Woolf
herself could not predict the profound changes that would come over England in the years
to come. Clarissa's party displays a dying idea of England where the representatives of
this England aristocracy indulge themselves in an ostentatious display. Nevertheless, this
England seems to be no more guilty of hubris than the human individual who stubbornly
celebrates life when faced with the inevitability of death.
Woolf's successive mental breakdowns provide much of the material found in Mrs.
Dalloway. The insensitive doctors in the novel are based on her own experiences with the
medical profession. At the time, such mental health problems were considered nonexistent, an embarrassment, or a product of moral weakness. Woolf did not survive the
effects of her own successive mental illnesses. On Mach 28, 1941, after an unparalleled
career, she left suicide notes for her husband and sister Vanessa before drowning herself
in the River Ouse. She was suffering from the onset of another breakdown and feared that
this one would be permanent.
Study Questions
1. Mrs. Dalloway was deemed “experimental” in its day, and Woolf believed that with it
she had made a major contribution to the modern reinvention of the novel. Woolf wanted
the novel’s form to reflect and also recreate what she considered to be a uniquely modern
experience of the world. How does it do this, and what is that experience like? (You
might begin thinking along these lines: Though the “stream of consciousness” passages
and the lack of traditional chapter divisions can give the novel a formless feel, it does
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have formal unity. For example, Woolf observes, to some extent, the classical unities of
time and place, and she establishes patterns of images, phrases, and events that connect
the different parts of the narrative to each other and also emphasize connections among
the characters.)
2. Think about how Woolf develops her characters in Mrs. Dalloway. Here is one place
to start: Woolf once described her technique as a “tunnelling process”: “I dig out
beautiful caves behind my characters,” she wrote. “[And] I tell the past in installments, as
I have need of it.” In other words, Woolf’s characters reveal their depths gradually and
piecemeal; fragments of thought and memory emerge as they respond to and interact with
their surroundings and other characters, and from these fragments we piece together each
character’s past and a tentative idea of his or her “whole being.”
3. Clarissa’s insight that Septimus “was somehow like her” both is and is not startling.
Though they never meet, and though they move in entirely different social spheres and
have had radically different life experiences, Clarissa is the only person who “hears” the
message Septimus sends via his suicide. Why is this? How are the two characters related?
Some readers find a spiritual likeness between them. Some emphasize instead their
functional roles in the novel, arguing, for instance, that Septimus symbolizes and
embodies England’s war trauma while Clarissa represents the very ideal of “Englishness”
that the War put into question
4. Septimus externalizes what goes on inside most people. He outwardly expresses the
wild mood swings, the association of seemingly unrelated ideas, and conversations with
people who aren't physically present. Clarissa and other people regularly conduct mental
arguments with people who aren't present. Clarissa experiences wild mood swings, but
she keeps them to herself. She associates seemingly unrelated ideas. For example, she
associates her exclusion from Lady Bruton's invitation with her sexual anxieties.
Clarissa's metaphorical suicide is considered perfectly normal, while Septimus's threats of
literal suicide are considered entirely abnormal.
5. What exactly are the consequences of Clarissa's decision to become "the perfect
hostess"? How do we know that Clarissa is insecure about her decision to live the
conventional upper-class life?
6. Early in Mrs. Dalloway, a car transporting an unknown person backfires. The crowd in
the street is convinced the person inside the car is of great importance. Describe the
crowd's reaction. How is Septimus' reaction different?
7. What are some possible interpretations for the plane spelling out an indecipherable
message?
8. Peter muses that human relationships are mostly made up of fantasy. How does this
relate to the relationships in the novel? How does it relate to the theme of interpretation in
the novel?
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9. How are Sally and Peter wrong in their estimation of Richard's character? Sally Seton
was a close friend of Clarissa's in their youth. She and Peter also shared a special bond. It
also seems that she and Clarissa had a homosexual attraction to one another. Sally was a
wild, rambunctious girl who smoked cigars and held highly controversial views.
10. Why didn’t Clarissa marry Peter? Did she have an underlying psychological need to
marry Richard instead of Peter?
11. How is Richard’s willingness to ‘honor the gulf’ between people important to
Clarissa? Is she simply leading a sterile life as Peter seems to think?
12. In marrying Richard, did Clarissa choose emotional freedom over passion?
13. Why does Clarissa seem to have an deep concern for ‘privacy of the soul’? In what
way does this concern reflect beliefs of the Bloomsbury group?
14. Is her recognition of the uniqueness of the human spirit and her refusal to sanction
any coercion of that spirit really the highest good for a human being? Or is Clarissa
simply a cold and isolated human?
15. Do women and men need a ‘stretch of privacy’ or boundaries around them? Do
boundaries preclude a passionate, loving relationship?
16. What about her relationship with Sally Seton? Would Clarissa need and demand
boundaries in all her relationships? In what ways are her boundaries with Richard helpful
or unhelpful for her?
Suggestions for Further Reading
Rosenthal, Michael. Virginia Woolf. New York. Columbia University Press. 1979.
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