Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025