The 100 best novels
written in English
No 50
Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Woolf's great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness
Robert McCrum
Monday 1 September 2014
I
n the spring of 1924, Virginia Woolf, then in her 40s, gave a famous lecture, later published as the essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, in which she declared that "we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature". She might have been speaking about herself. In the next 15-odd years, before her suicide, Woolf would transform the English literary landscape forever. She would innovate (To the Lighthouse); she would flirt (Orlando); she would provoke (A Room of One's Own) and, privately, would dazzle herself and her friends with a stream of letters (and diaries), all of which reveal a writer's mind at full tilt.
Woolf is one of the giants of this series, and Mrs Dalloway, her fourth novel, is one of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers. Like Ulysses (no 46 in this series), it takes place in the course of a single day, probably 13 June 1923. Unlike Joyce's masterpiece, Woolf's female protagonist is an upper-class English woman living in Westminster who is planning a party for her husband, a mid-level Tory politician.As Clarissa Dalloway's day unfolds, in and around Mayfair, we discover that not only is she being treated in Harley Street for severe depression, a familiar subject to Woolf, but she also conceals a troubled past replete with unarticulated love and suggestions of lesbianism. Equally troubled is the novel's second main character, explicitly a "double", a Great War veteran who fought in France "to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays". Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell shock and is on his way to a consultation with Clarissa's psychiatrist. Mingled with the preparations for the party, the stream-of-consciousness exploration of Mrs Dalloway's inner state is broken by an irruption of senseless violence when Septimus, who is waiting to be taken to an asylum, throws himself out of a window. News of Septimus's suicide becomes a topic of conversation at Mrs Dalloway's party, where Woolf indicates Clarissa's deep sympathy for the dead man's suffering. The novel ends unresolved, but on a note of suspenseful menace. "What is this terror?" writes Woolf. "What is this ecstasy?" Her mature work would be devoted to exploring these questions.
A note on the text
Mrs Dalloway, published by the Hogarth Press with a striking Vanessa Bell dust jacket on 14 May 1925, was a novel that grew out of two previous short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and The Prime Minister. The latter makes his appearance at the party at the end of the novel. Clarissa also appeared in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, as well as in five of her short stories.
Mrs Dalloway's literary influence can be seen in Michael Cunningham's The Hours and perhaps also in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which takes place on a single day, 15 February 2003.
Three more from Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando (1928); A Room of One's Own (1929).
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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