Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf review: ‘one brief day in a woman's mind' – archive, 1925

The Guardian

14-05-2025

5 June 1925
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press. Pp 293. 7s 6d
The earlier and very impressive novels of Mrs Woolf did not lead us to expect that as her development approached complete maturity her style would take on such a talkative character as it reveals in Mrs Dalloway. Not talkative in the garrulous tiresome sense, though; but with the dignity which always distinguished the work of her friend the late Katherine Mansfield. Indeed, the opening pages (one cannot say the opening chapter, for the book runs straight on, without any divisions) are delightfully reminiscent of Mrs Mansfield's best work, and Mrs Woolf's setting of a West End morning in June is as full of vivacious life and fresh colour as the actuality – granted, of course, fine weather and sunlight. She has aimed, moreover, at presenting the kaleidoscopic moments of a busily reminiscent mind rather than any continuous story.
There is no substance to the book in the ordinary sense of plot and narrative. Clarissa Dalloway, a well-preserved woman of 50, wife of a successful politician, wakes up on the morning of an important party she has arranged for the evening, and gradually her thoughts drift to her own childhood and girlhood, to her daughter Elizabeth and the daughter's crabbed history tutor, to her husband in his younger days, and to the man who went to India instead of marrying her.
That is all – one brief day in a woman's mind. The book is written with brilliant finesse, originality, and charm, and Mrs Woolf's psychological insight, if not this development in her method, enables her to retain a unique position among the women novelists of our time.
By H I'AF
14 May 1925
The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. Pp305. 12s 6d
'Journalism,' writes Virginia Woolf, 'embalmed in a book is unreadable.' No one has more right to proclaim the fact than she, who has discovered how to write for the newspapers without ceasing to be an artist and how to exalt criticism into a creative adventure which, though intensely personal and provocative, is yet preserved by the finest sense of values from the quixotry of impressionism. Certainly we have seldom read a volume of essays which, by their sufficiency and freshness, insight and accomplishment, so captivate and satisfy the mind. It is the combination of brilliance and integrity which is so rare, and we will confess that until we read this volume we credited Virginia Woolf with more charm and vivacity than vision, delighted in her style for its supple simplification of complexity, but with a suspicion that her victory was more often over words than ideas.
Such a misjudgment was made easier because her ideas are seldom explicit: she is so fine an artist because her thought, concentrated and effective as it is, is not starkly separated from the fluid elements of experience, from her immediate human response to the life that literature and writings too humble to rank as literature embody. It is thus that she succeeds in combining keen analysis with a synthesising humanity and can disentangle the ideas which animated an individual or a people in the very process of picturing, with a selective fidelity to detail, the objective circumstances of their lives. And being thus both exact and imaginative, her intercourse with her subjects is really that of a contemporary, and not that kind of ironic intimacy which, however stealthily, betrays a detached egotism by its tendency to exploit.
This illusion of complete critical identity with her subject Virginia Woolf achieves in almost all her studies, particularly in her vivid picture of the lives of the Pastons, of Montaigne, Evelyn, Addison, and of those 'stranded ghosts' whom she delivers from the obscurity of an 'obsolete library.' It is nowhere more shiningly displayed than in her reconception of the Greek drama and the hard, sharply outlined Greek world that was its stage and dictated its emphasis, brevity, and elemental force. For here, as in her studies of Charlotte and Emily Broute and of the Russian novelists, a writer whom we had supposed to be somewhat of the self-centred and self-limited order, rather mistress of the incisive phrase than a diver in deep waters, reveals, too, an expansiveness and profundity of understanding which is so seldom served by transparency, a sense of the primitive and elemental as remarkable as her knowledge of the mannered and the eccentric.