Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - Review

The past lives with us always

Virginia Woolf has a reputation for being one of the great literary experimentalists of the 20th century, a pioneer of the modernist novel who broke new ground not only in literary style but also in the representation of women, effectively laying the foundation for feminist fiction and thereby galvanising the feminist movement in the early decades of the 20th century. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf's fourth and most widely read novel, a work of breathtaking originality that is arguably the most compelling and accessible of the author's great works. Woolf wrote the novel in 1924, developing it from a short story she had previously written, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, and seems to have been strongly influenced by James Joyce's Ulysses, which she had been reading whilst preparing the novel.

Like Joyce's magnum opus, albeit on a far less epic scale, Mrs Dalloway depicts a single day - 13th June 1924 - in the life of its main protagonist, the society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares an evening party to be attended by her important London acquaintances. Woolf was pretty contemptuous of Joyce's work (now considered a major landmark of English literature) but borrows some of his techniques in creating her own impressionistic style of writing. Switching between direct and indirect speech as the narrative moves its focus back and forth between a dozen or so characters, Woolf provides a template for the stream of consciousness novel which other authors - notably Jean-Paul Sartre - would develop to its fullest extent.

Woolf originally titled the novel The Hours and it is her preoccupation with time that provides the motivation for the work. The author's main influence was Henri Bergson's controversial theory about psychological time, which asserts that our individual awareness of the passage of time arises from the continual interplay of our present sensations (being in the here and now) and memories of past experiences. According to Bergson's thesis, the past is constantly flowing into the present; there is no clear demarcation of the two. This is an ideal that Marcel Proust would exploit brilliantly in his great tome, In Remembrance of Lost Time. In Woolf's novel, the central characters - particularly its two most fully developed ones, Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith - are frequently shown to be wandering off in the fourth dimension, their past recollections and future anxieties impinging so strongly on their present experiences that the three time-frames become virtually inseparable.

In her early fifties, Clarissa is settled in a comfortable marriage to a well-respected (but hardly distinguished) Member of Parliament, but she is troubled by the notion that she has not made the best of her life. These anxieties gain more credence when a former lover of hers, Peter Walsh, returns to visit her after a protracted stay in India, and begins making amorous overtures (whilst constantly fiddling with a knife in his pocket). Clarissa's thoughts are redirected to her youth and happier times, a high point being the moment when she stole an illicit kiss from a close girl friend, Sally Seaton. Now that she has a grown-up daughter of her own who is on the point of marriage, Clarissa feels the cold embrace of the grave drawing ever nearer. Domestic comfort and the good regard of society are her sole consolations for a wasted life.

Through her inner reflections the glibly self-sufficient Mrs Dalloway convinces herself she is a failure, and in doing so she paints herself as a tragic heroine. Yet her self-pitying assessment of her lot appears pretty sick when set against the woes of the male character that serves as her counterpoint, the pathetic war veteran Septimus Walsh. It has been some years since Walsh dislocated himself physically from the horrors of the First World War, but whilst for most people the war is now in the past, for him it clings to his present consciousness, like one of those irritating melodies you just cannot cannot get out of your head.

The ex-soldier's recollections of the war are so deeply etched on his mind that they prevent his temporal development, dominating and distorting his perceptions of the present to such a degree that he sees menace and treachery all around him. As his psychosis blossoms into full fledged persecution mania, Septimus rails agains the world with a messianic fervour, and his devoted Italian wife Rezia is powerless to help him. Herself a victim of mental illness throughout her life, Woolf was well placed to put into words the trauma and anguish of living with an unbalanced mind; her description of Septimus's descent into hell has such a ringing authenticity that you can but weep.

Woolf's far from complimentary portrayal of how the medical profession of the time regarded 'afflictions of the mind' (the term 'mental illness' had yet to be coined) provides the novel with its most merciless assault on contemporary attitudes. But she is no less scathing in her representation of that stratum of society, a worthless upper crust elite, that exists merely for social functions. The aristocratic Lady Bruton and her well-groomed ilk are the last vestiges of a privileged class that will mostly be swept away by the end of the decade, and Woolf reserves her most trenchant humour for these self-adoring emblems of a redundant class.

Mrs Dalloway is poignant, witty and elegant - one of the few Virginia Woolf novels that can be enjoyed by the average man or woman in the street whilst impressing her more seriously minded devotees as a work of exceptional originality and sophistication. Written as a single running narrative, without chapter breaks, the book carries you along with it effortlessly and it is all too easy to devour it in a single sitting (as I did on my first reading of it). Woolf's skilful appropriation of cinematic devices - flashbacks, close-ups, long tracking shots and so forth - give the novel an astonishing immediacy, an impression of being in the moment - something that the French term sur le vif.

You not only see the characters as they make their way down the bustling, noisy streets of London on a bright summer's morning, amble peacefully across Regent's Park or struggle with a bit of shopping at the Army and Navy stores, you actually feel that you are there, sharing their experiences, breathing the same delicately fragranced air. After closing the book the immediate impression you have is that you have not waded through an ingenious, masterfully composed work of fiction, but rather that you have been totally immersed in the most absorbing piece of cinema.