The
Connell Guide
to
Virginia Woolf ’s
Mrs Dalloway
by
John Sutherland and Susanna Hislop
,Contents
Introduction 4
A summary of the plot 7
What is Mrs Dalloway about? 11
What is distinctive about the narrative voice? 21
What view of personality emerges from
Mrs Dalloway? 36
Why does Clarissa suffer from a sense of loss? 45
Why is Clarissa’s relationship with Sally Seton
so important? 52
How are Clarissa and Septimus linked in the novel? 65
What does Mrs Dalloway tell us about
British society? 78
How does the novel connect doctors with
British imperialism? 91
How can the individual escape authority in
Mrs Dalloway? 102
How disturbing is Mrs Dalloway? 110
, NO TES
The origins of Mrs Dalloway 8
The Bloomsbury group 14
The sky-writing plane 18
Madness 20
A room of her own 26
Stream of consciousness 28
Big Ben 31
The cinema 32
Mrs Dalloway’s London stroll 38
Woolf on Proust 41
The menopause 46
The Woolfs and children 49
Woolf and Vita Sackville-West 55
Woolf ’s female friendships 56
Septimus’s heroism 69
Shell shock 70
Ten facts about Mrs Dalloway 75
Names 80
The Canadian crisis 93
Empson’s complaint 97
Parties 112
Politics in June 1923 118
Critics on Woolf 121
, Introduction
It is hard to find anyone nowadays who will dare
venture a bad word on Mrs Dalloway: its status
as major literature, a pioneer feminist text and
a brilliantly experimental work, is wholly secure.
Woolf is, with Jane Austen, the leading woman
novelist in English Literature, and this novel is one
of the peaks of her literary achievement. In short,
Mrs Dalloway is a “classic”.
At the time of its publication, however, opinions
were more mixed than ours. It was hard in the
mid-1920s to come to terms with what, for many,
seemed a vexatiously new-fangled work. The
reading public was not yet ready for the challenge
of what came to be called “stream of
consciousness” narrative, or the inner richness
of a novel whose main event, a superficial reading
might suggest, is an upper-class Conservative
politician’s wife’s purchase of flowers for a summer
party. This, recall, in the immediate aftermath of
a conflict, the First World War, which had shaken
the whole of Europe to its foundations.
It was without doubt an intellectual and
well-ordered novel, granted P.C. Kennedy in his
contemporary review – but “there are no people”.
By which he meant characters a reader like himself
could easily identify with. Virginia Woolf’s arch-
rival, Arnold Bennett, about whom she would
write scathingly (and amusingly), snorted angrily
4
Connell Guide
to
Virginia Woolf ’s
Mrs Dalloway
by
John Sutherland and Susanna Hislop
,Contents
Introduction 4
A summary of the plot 7
What is Mrs Dalloway about? 11
What is distinctive about the narrative voice? 21
What view of personality emerges from
Mrs Dalloway? 36
Why does Clarissa suffer from a sense of loss? 45
Why is Clarissa’s relationship with Sally Seton
so important? 52
How are Clarissa and Septimus linked in the novel? 65
What does Mrs Dalloway tell us about
British society? 78
How does the novel connect doctors with
British imperialism? 91
How can the individual escape authority in
Mrs Dalloway? 102
How disturbing is Mrs Dalloway? 110
, NO TES
The origins of Mrs Dalloway 8
The Bloomsbury group 14
The sky-writing plane 18
Madness 20
A room of her own 26
Stream of consciousness 28
Big Ben 31
The cinema 32
Mrs Dalloway’s London stroll 38
Woolf on Proust 41
The menopause 46
The Woolfs and children 49
Woolf and Vita Sackville-West 55
Woolf ’s female friendships 56
Septimus’s heroism 69
Shell shock 70
Ten facts about Mrs Dalloway 75
Names 80
The Canadian crisis 93
Empson’s complaint 97
Parties 112
Politics in June 1923 118
Critics on Woolf 121
, Introduction
It is hard to find anyone nowadays who will dare
venture a bad word on Mrs Dalloway: its status
as major literature, a pioneer feminist text and
a brilliantly experimental work, is wholly secure.
Woolf is, with Jane Austen, the leading woman
novelist in English Literature, and this novel is one
of the peaks of her literary achievement. In short,
Mrs Dalloway is a “classic”.
At the time of its publication, however, opinions
were more mixed than ours. It was hard in the
mid-1920s to come to terms with what, for many,
seemed a vexatiously new-fangled work. The
reading public was not yet ready for the challenge
of what came to be called “stream of
consciousness” narrative, or the inner richness
of a novel whose main event, a superficial reading
might suggest, is an upper-class Conservative
politician’s wife’s purchase of flowers for a summer
party. This, recall, in the immediate aftermath of
a conflict, the First World War, which had shaken
the whole of Europe to its foundations.
It was without doubt an intellectual and
well-ordered novel, granted P.C. Kennedy in his
contemporary review – but “there are no people”.
By which he meant characters a reader like himself
could easily identify with. Virginia Woolf’s arch-
rival, Arnold Bennett, about whom she would
write scathingly (and amusingly), snorted angrily
4
