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Unit 28: Virginia Woolf — Mrs. Dalloway

Notes

Notes Virginia trusted his literary judgment. Their marriage was a partnership, though
some suggest their sexual relationship was nonexistent.

Virginia fell ill more frequently as she grew older, often taking respite in rest homes and in
the care of her husband. In 1917, Leonard founded the Hogarth Press to publish their own
books, hoping that Virginia could bestow the care on the press that she would have bestowed
on children. (She had been advised by doctors not to become pregnant after her third serious
breakdown in 1913. Virginia was fond of children, however, and spent much time with her
brother’s and sister’s children.) Through the press, she had an early look at Joyce’s Ulysses
and aided authors such as Forster, Freud, Isherwood, Mansfield, Tolstoy, and Chekov. She
sold her half interest in 1938.
Before her death, Virginia published an extraordinary amount of groundbreaking material.
She was a renowned member of the Bloomsbury Group and a leading writer of the modernist
movement with her use of innovative literary techniques. In contrast to the majority of literature
written before the early 1900s, which emphasized plot and detailed descriptions of characters
and settings, Woolf’s writing thoroughly explores the concepts of time, memory, and consciousness.
The plot is generated by the characters’ inner lives, not by the external world.
In March 1941, Woolf left suicide notes for her husband and sister and drowned herself in a
nearby river. She feared her madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue
writing, and she wished to spare her loved ones.
Over the course of her many illnesses, however, Woolf had remained productive. Her intense
powers of concentration had allowed her to work ten to twelve hours writing. Her most
notable publications include Night and Day, The Mark on the Wall, Jacob’s Room, Monday or
Tuesday, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, The
Years, and Between the Acts. In total, her work comprises five volumes of collected essays and
reviews, two biographies (Flush and Roger Fry), two libertarian books, a volume of selections
from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of short stories.

28.2 Virginia Woolf — Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction to the Text

28.2.1 Introduction to the Mrs. Dalloway

In Jacob’s Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the
same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the
theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, “I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the
world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” However, even the theme that would lead
Woolf to create a double for Clarissa Dalloway can be viewed as a progression of other similar
ideas cultivated in Jacob’s Room. Woolf’s next novel, then, was a natural development from
Jacob’s Room, as well as an expansion of the short stories she wrote before deciding to make
Mrs. Dalloway into a full novel.
The Dalloways had been introduced in the novel, The Voyage Out, but Woolf presented the
couple in a harsher light than she did in later years. Richard is domineering and pompous.
Clarissa is dependent and superficial. Some of these qualities remain in the characters of Mrs.
Dalloway but the two generally appear much more reasonable and likeable. Clarissa was
modeled after a friend of Woolf’s named Kitty Maxse, whom Woolf thought to be a superficial
socialite. Though she wanted to comment upon the displeasing social system, Woolf found it

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