Mrs Dalloway

Careful: this gives away how the book ends. It also deals with suicide.

Clarissa Dalloway goes out to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. The book lasts one day: from a June morning to midnight.

That is the whole plot. But inside that one day there are thirty years.

Who is there

Clarissa is fifty-two, married to a man who sits in parliament, and lives a comfortable life in London. Her daughter Elizabeth has grown up.

Peter Walsh proposed to her in their youth and was refused. That day he is returning from India and visits without warning.

Sally Seton was Clarissa's closest friend in youth. A kiss passed between them, and Clarissa remembers that moment as the happiest of her life.

Septimus Warren Smith is a young man back from the war. He does not know Clarissa at all and will never meet her.

The leaping of the sentences

Woolf passes from one character's mind to another without warning.

Walking in the street, Clarissa suddenly goes back thirty years, comes back, hears a car horn, jumps from there to another memory, then thinks about what to buy at the florist.

Who is thinking, when they are thinking, I could not follow in the first pages. In the middle of a sentence the narrator can change.

Then I realized: the inside of my head already works like this.

That a text could write this so accurately surprised me. Thought does not proceed in sequence. A smell opens up a year, a word takes you back seven years, then you return to the task at hand and do not remember what you were doing.

In 1925 Woolf put this into the form of the sentence.

What really matters

She could have written this as a mess too. She did not.

She wrote it as richness. Clarissa's mind is not flawed because it wanders; it is so wide because it wanders.

This distinction stayed with me and I thought about it for a while. There are two ways of describing the same thing, and which one you choose determines how you live with it.

Septimus

The other half of the book and the place that really struck me.

He lost his friend Evans in the war. When he returns he realizes he feels nothing, and this horrifies him. Then he begins to see his dead friend, to hear the birds speaking Greek.

His wife Rezia is Italian; she married him and came to London, and now she does not understand what her husband has become, cannot explain it to anyone, and is very lonely.

There are two doctors. The first, Dr. Holmes, says there is nothing wrong with him and suggests he go to the theater. The second, Sir William Bradshaw, is far more polite and far more dangerous: he says Septimus must gain "a sense of proportion" and decides to have him committed to an institution.

Woolf is very harsh when writing this second doctor. She describes a medical outlook that steals people's lives in the name of "proportion."

Why she knew it so well

Woolf herself went through severe mental periods in her life and was subjected to exactly this kind of "rest cure": being laid up in a dark room, being forbidden to read, being force-fed.

Septimus's scenes with the doctors read less like fiction than like testimony.

The gradual narrowing of a person who is not taken seriously. Written a hundred years ago, and anyone who has seen what they said in a doctor's room get lightened away recognizes it.

Where she does not tie it together

Septimus jumps from the window as the doctors come to take him.

Clarissa hears the news at her party: the Bradshaws arrive late and give as the reason a patient's suicide.

The two never meet. The same day, the same city. One gives her party, one dies.

Woolf does not bring them together, and that she does not felt heavier to me. Life is like this too: the same afternoon, unaware of each other.

Clarissa withdraws to a room and thinks. She reads his death not as a defeat but as a kind of effort to preserve wholeness. Then she returns to her party.

This last section is the most debated place in the book: Clarissa's reaction feels cold to some readers, deep to others. I was caught between the two.

Big Ben

Through the whole book the clock strikes, and with each strike we learn what hour it is.

This is the single fixed point inside the scattering minds. Woolf lets mental time loose while keeping calendar time tight, and the tension between the two is the book's backbone.

When not to read it

It cannot be read with divided attention. I tried, it did not work; I got lost in two pages and missed who was thinking.

It asks for a quiet, uninterrupted stretch. In the weeks when I could not find one I did not pick it up, and that was the right decision.

Two hundred pages. A short book but not a fast one.