The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowers
In an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier. She challenged the primacy of plot with a stream of consciousness that flowed unapologetically through doubt, memory, and fragmented desire. In Mrs Dalloway, time bent and buckled to accommodate emotion; in A Room of One's Own (1929), she declared space and income the foundations for female creativity. These were radical acts of reclamation. She wrote with the full force of a mind that refused to compartmentalise intellect and emotion, and made room for a new language for both feminism and fiction.
A century and many movements for women's rights later, the questions Mrs Dalloway raised continues to be relevant still: How do women stitch meaning into days that ask them to be beautiful, dutiful, but not necessarily whole? How do women live truthfully in a world that so often mistakes performance for presence? In an age of curated selves and constant noise, Mrs Dalloway pulls people back to the politics of thought, the necessity of empathy. Woolf's work endures not simply because it was ahead of its time, but because it continues to meet each generation exactly where they are — searching, unsettled, and yearning for more.
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Mint
29-06-2025
- Mint
Love between women comes of age with ‘Mrs Dalloway'
Ruth Vanita At 100, Virginia Woolf's classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality Natascha McElhone and Lena Heady in 'Mrs Dalloway' (1997). Gift this article A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. Mrs Dalloway packs its startling originality into less than 64,000 words. James Joyce's Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing particularly important happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf loved to do, in the afternoon she rests, and in the evening, she gives a party. Mrs Dalloway is not about events. It reveals the horrors of war and the self-importance and egotism of colonial bureaucrats but its concern is with the pains and pleasures of individuals. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to meeting old friends, in two dimensions—the past and the present. She has a tranquil and affectionate marriage, but she fondly recalls Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything 'intolerable". Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because she knew, with wisdom remarkable in a young woman, that 'a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house". This is a sentiment which anyone who has been married for many years would understand. It is also one with which the great heroines of English comedy, from Shakespeare's Rosalind to Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, would surely agree. A few pages into the novel, Clarissa thinks, with some guilt vis-à-vis her kind and considerate husband, about her lack of erotic warmth towards men, her 'cold spirit", which Peter too comments on. She knows, though, that she has felt for women 'what men felt". In an extraordinary passage, Woolf describes female desire in a way that evokes orgasm, specifically female orgasm: 'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment." This is the best description of female orgasm I have ever read. As all great writing does, it colours precise description with something more than mere technical detail. The match burning in the crocus, like the Buddhist jewel in the lotus, lights up the world, connects the individual to the universe. Continuing to think about 'falling in love with women," Clarissa recalls her youthful love for her friend Sally Seton. She 'could not take her eyes off" Sally, she imbibed Sally's radical ideas about literature, society and life, she admired Sally's beauty as well as her reckless, unconventional behaviour. At first, Clarissa thinks that she cannot feel her old emotions again, but as she undresses and re-dresses, the feeling starts returning to her. As a young girl, dressing to meet Sally, she had felt, as Othello felt when he met his wife, 'if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." As she and Sally walked together at night, Clarissa remembers 'the most exquisite moment of her whole life" when Sally 'kissed her on the lips". She felt as if she had been given 'something infinitely precious," when Peter interrupted. The interruption was a painful shock to her. She compares it to running your face against a granite wall in the dark, and she also felt Peter's 'hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship." 'Mrs Dalloway' is not about events. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Mrs Dalloway is the first major novel in English to explicitly depict a woman falling in love with another woman. The year it was published, Woolf, who was 43 years old, began a passionate affair with the novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was a well-known lesbian and married to a gay man. In her diaries and letters, Woolf evokes Vita's 'incandescent" beauty in lyrical terms: 'she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung." Three years later, in 1928, when Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was censored, Woolf and her close friend, the novelist E.M. Forster, who was also gay, published a letter of protest. Hall refused their attempt to draft a statement that many writers were willing to sign, because Hall wanted them to defend the book on the basis of its literary merit, not merely on the basis of freedom of speech. Neither Woolf nor the other writers thought that The Well of Loneliness was a work of literary excellence. Nevertheless, Woolf was ready to testify in court on its behalf but the court ruled out all testimony and banned the book. The Well of Loneliness is a historically important book read mainly by scholars today; Mrs Dalloway is as vital and surprising now as it was when first published. Woolf's novel Orlando, published in 1928, is much acclaimed these days because it is about miraculous sex change and identity. Orlando is inspired by love. Woolf wrote it as a portrait of Sackville-West. But Orlando is not about love. It is a portrait of a remarkable bisexual person. Mrs Dalloway is a far greater novel than Orlando. At the end of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa hears about the suicide of a traumatised soldier, Septimus, who was married to a woman but loved a man who died in the war. Clarissa senses, almost mystically, that she is similar to Septimus and that he died holding on to the thing that matters most whereas she and her friends have let go of it. Is that thing love? Is it the ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe? She is not sure but she knows that it is obscured in her own life: 'closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,' she had said to herself once, coming down in white." The novel ends with love—Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa's husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally's statement, 'What does the brain matter compared with the heart?" Ruth Vanita is a professor, translator and author, most recently of the novel A Slight Angle. Topics You May Be Interested In
Hindustan Times
13-06-2025
- Hindustan Times
Review: Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill
Dalloway Day, an annual event, was celebrated on June 11, marking the 100th anniversary, this year, of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Published by Hogarth Press, that the author set up with her husband Leonard in their basement at Hogarth House in Richmond, London, the novel challenged the Victorian idea of a plot. A luminary text, that has been adapted to films and plays, it is set to soon have its own biography published by Manchester University Press. But as everyone holds forth about the centenary – the book was published on May 14, 1925 though Dalloway Day celebrations are held in mid-June, when the central event of the novel, Mrs Dalloway's party, takes place – few question Woolf's colonial gaze. Indeed, the Eurasian character left in the margins has rarely been addressed. Far away from the colonial metropole, Daisy, Peter Walsh's Anglo-Indian lover awaits news from him in India. When Woolf mentions her in passing, it is with an air of racial superiority even as her protagonist, Clarissa, suffers from low self esteem. 'Oh if she [Mrs. Dalloway] could have had her life over again!...She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin like crumpled leather and beautiful eyes… slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere… She [Mrs Dalloway] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them… this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.' The passage establishes Woolf's protagonist as someone without an inherent sense of self. In her fifties, when she is no longer pressed by the duties of being a wife and a mother, Clarissa Dalloway finds herself wanting to be more than her social identity as wife of a conservative MP with her silks and scissors preparing to throw a party on a fine evening in 1923. As she walks across London, she has opinions on everyone but it's not the same as participating in luncheons hosted by Mrs Bruton where they discuss politics. From Hugh Whitbread and Peter Walsh to Sally Seton and Miss Killman, everyone is scrutinised, even Septimus Smith's wife, Lucrezia, 'a little woman, with large eyes in sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.' Everyone, but not 53-year-old Peter Walsh's 24-year-old Anglo-Indian lover, Daisy, wife of a major, mother of two in India. She describes Indian women at large as 'silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops.' The stream of consciousness narrative, whose film parallel would ideally comprise one long single shot somehow narrated from the perspective of different characters, makes the reader wonder: Was Daisy merely a tool to explore the complex relationship that Peter and Clarissa shared in their youth? For Peter looks at Daisy as someone who'd boost his ego, '…of course, she would give him everything…everything he wanted!' which Clarissa had bruised. He describes, in his insecurity, the women he loved over the years as 'vulgar, trivial, commonplace' and has thought before that 'Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa.' Clarissa's presence in his life is further underlined by the impactful lines at the end of the text: 'It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.' The contemporary reader is bound to ask: With Clarissa's overbearing presence, what was Daisy doing in Peter's life? Compensating for the void left behind by Clarissa? When Woolf dug her characters from within, showcasing their perception of each other, why was Daisy left voiceless far away in India? Her mixed race mentioned but not explored. A century later, enter Michelle Cahill with Daisy & Woolf. An Australian of Anglo-Indian heritage, the author provides a glimpse of Daisy's life along with the difficulties and blockages that come with it by introducing a mixed-race immigrant protagonist, Mina, who is writing Daisy's story. Woolf is evoked in the novel's epigraph with a quote from A Room of One's Own: 'A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.' While the book revolves around motherhood quite a bit, the epigraph works like a double-edged sword: it showcases gratitude for the feminist writers who have paved the way for the telling of Daisy's story while also challenging their silence that has rendered voiceless this character at the margins. In this metafiction set in 2017, Cahill presents the dilemmas of race and migration through Mina's reimagination, in the novel that she is writing, of Daisy journeying to London to meet Peter Walsh. Mina writes, 'Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump's immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world people of colour felt vulnerable while crossing borders.' As the storyteller of Daisy's life, she narrates harrowing experiences of being Anglo-Indians from East Africa and of her brother's mental illness, a result of being bullied at school for being brown skinned. It's as if Mina, and Cahill herself, is attempting to fill an intersectional gap in the canon. Instead of writing a straight postcolonial response like Jean Rhys does for Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, Cahill makes her work partly epistolary. Between Mina's meditation on racism and writing and her travels across India, China, London, and New York to find the nuances of Woolf's life, Daisy tells her story through letters and diary entries. Alongside, Mina writes, 'Mrs Woolf had kept Daisy stunted, and on purpose it seems. Her intent was always to centre Clarissa Dalloway, setting her in flight. Drifting and timeless, she is a hallmark achievement: Clarissa, the stream of Virginia Woolf's consciousness.' Daisy too addresses the absorbing nature of Clarissa's presence, which makes you wonder if she will ever see herself as Clarissa's equal or if she will succumb to class and racial hierarchies. She writes, '…although you [Walsh] hint at… an air of disappointment about Clarissa, it is impossible for me to imagine a woman more absorbing?' Cahill's Daisy has the decisive power to leave her husband and son behind to board a ship for London with her daughter and Radhika, a servant girl from Bihar. She reflects on her experiences as an Anglo-Indian in India by chronicling her life story and through the course of a journey lasting months from Calcutta to London, she comes face-to-face with the plague, loses her child to death, which changes her romantic obsession into something much stronger, a determination to chart out her life irrespective of Peter Walsh. She engages with the suffragettes, befriends Lucrezia — the other peripheral character in Mrs Dalloway — and makes a living in Italy, which can be interpreted as tragic for the former wife of an officer in the Indian army or as empowering for an immigrant woman in an alien land. Interestingly, Cahill leaves Daisy's servant girl behind. Radhika disappears, quite literally, from Daisy's life implying that not all stories can be accommodated when the writer chooses to focus on one character. However, this absence is observed and mourned by Daisy, who was held together by her support in the lowest times — a treatment that's better than Woolf's treatment of Daisy. Throughout the novel, Cahill keeps fictional characters and real-life figures in conversation with each other. Daisy & Woolf is meta not only for its story-within-a-story structure but also for the many references to Woolf's diaries and letters to interpret her psychology at the time. Daisy is also travelling to London at a time when Woolf is writing Mrs Dalloway. Characters from Woolf's story and suffragette figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst are masterfully incorporated into Daisy's narrative. All of it creates a dialogue between the worlds of Mina, Virginia and Daisy while also exploring grief, death, motherhood, alienation, sexuality and mental illness. The prose of both these novels is distinctive. But while Mrs Dalloway glides, Daisy & Woolf startles by intentionally hitting the brakes on multiple occasions. In the end, this novel, that breathes life into an incidental character, encourages readers to examine the colonial gaze of a celebrated 20th century high Modernist, while also realising that race, identity and migration are as fraught today as they ever were. Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
