Mark Hussey: Mrs Dalloway - Biography of a Novel review - echoes across crises

Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19^th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.

Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a visit from an old friend, Peter Walsh; and she worries about her daughter, Elizabeth, who has become ‘inseparable’ from her history teacher, Doris Kilman (who wears an offensive “green mackintosh coat”). As Clarissa prepares for her party, we also encounter Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked working-class veteran from the First World War, who, with his wife Lucrezia (an Italian hat-maker), goes to Harley Street for a consultation with a doctor. The eminent Dr William Bradshaw prescribes "proportion", but Septimus, plagued by terrifying hallucinations of his dead friend Evans, who he sees walking towards him in Regent’s Park, kills himself by throwing himself out of the window onto the area railings. Clarissa and Septimus do not meet, but news of his death accompanies the “obscurely evil” William Bradshaw to her party. And as she repeats a line from Shakespeare that Septimus also has quoted, Clarissa feels “somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself.”

Mrs Dalloway does explore “life & death, sanity & insanity”. It is a searing critique of the “social system”; it encompasses war and illness; shellshock and trauma; love; solitude; memory; marriage; friendship; and queer desire. For Woolf, Mrs Dalloway was the beginning of a new way of writing. She wrote in her diary of her “discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters.” “The idea is,” she continued, "that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment [….] It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far […].”

In Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel, Mark Hussey tells the story of how this novel emerged from Woolf’s early experiments with fiction to become one of the most enduring novels of the 20th century – a novel that continues to grip the imaginations of readers, writers, film-makers, musicians and artists one hundred years after its first publication by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s own Hogarth Press in 1925. Focusing “more on the how than the why of its persistence,” this “biography” traces the life of the novel from its earliest origins and drafts through publication and early reception to its global dissemination and multiple reimaginings and creative legacies today.

Woolf thought a great deal about what she called the “problem of biography”: “On the one hand there is truth,” she wrote, “on the other, there is personality.” For Woolf, the attempt to weld the “granite-like solidity” of truth with the “rainbow-like intangibility” of personality had failed. Critical of a tradition that tended so suggest that “History” (with the capital “H”) consists of the “Lives of Great Men”, Woolf – whose father Leslie Stephen was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography – sought to find new ways of writing about the lives of women and those who had been obscured from history.

Woolf’s decision to focus in Mrs Dalloway on the inner life of a society hostess has frequently been held up (and often been wilfully misread) as evidence of Woolf’s own snobbery. As Hussey puts it, the novel has often “been summoned as a witness for the prosecution” amongst those who continue to accuse the Bloomsbury group – and Woolf in particular – of elitism. In 1925, Woolf cited one of her own critics lamenting “the fact that I ‘contemplate the lives of the idle rich.’” And yet, to read the character of Clarissa Dalloway as a straightforward representative of Woolf’s own politics is to misread the novel. Woolf herself worried that the character might be too “tinselly”, while her friend Lytton Strachey thought she was “disagreeable & limited,” noting in the same sentence that “I alternately laugh at her, & cover her, very remarkably, with myself.”

For feminist readers in the 1970s especially, Woolf’s exploration of Clarissa’s inner life and her sensuous evocation of her memories of the kiss with Sally Seton (“the most exquisite moment of her whole life”) inspired what Sara Ahmed has described as an “outpouring of feminist sympathy.” As Hussey shows, it is thanks to the work of scholars who “talked back to those who had consigned Woolf to the category of minor lady novelist” that Mrs Dalloway has taken on this status in the feminist imagination.

Woolf was deeply suspicious of the institutionalisation of acts of reading in university English departments in the early 20th century. As Hussey argues, “Woolf championed the freedom of readers to choose their way through books without anyone looking over their shoulder.” In a 1924 essay titled ‘Character in Fiction’, Woolf criticised a tendency to put writers on a pedestal and encouraged readers to take up a “close and equal alliance” with writers, while in a talk given at a girls’ school titled ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Woolf argued that a reader should become the writer’s “accomplice”. In Mrs Dalloway, Hussey argues, Woolf’s use of a shifting form of third-person narrative that occupies different characters’ perspectives (her “tunnelling process”) creates a unique space in which the reader is invited to become the writer’s “accomplice.” For Hussey, it is Woolf’s ability to create this imaginative space for her readers that gives rise not only to the novel’s ability to “criticise the social system” and “show it at work, at its most intense,” but also to the novel’s extraordinary ability to speak to readers in different times and places.

In her notebook, Woolf wrote: 

Suppose it to be connected in this way:

Sanity & insanity.

Mrs D seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth.

[…] The Question is whether the inside of the mind in both Mrs D. & S.S. can be made luminous – that is to say the stuff of the book – lights on it coming from external sources.

 By making “the inside of the mind […] luminous”, Woolf explores the threads that connect Clarissa Dalloway’s “truth” with Septimus Smith’s ‘insane truth.’ Woolf conceived of Septimus as someone who had “been in the war” but was also “founded on me,” writing to Gwen Raverat just two weeks before the novel was published that this was “a subject I have kept cooling in my mind until I felt I could touch it without bursting into flame all over. You can’t think what a raging furnace it is still to me – madness and doctors and being forced.’ Offering her readers insight into Septimus’s experiences of “madness”, in Mrs Dalloway Woolf asks us to recognise that Septimus has access to a kind of truth about human brutality that his doctors refuse to see, and in fact themselves embody. By linking Septimus’ traumatised experiences as a shell-shocked First World War veteran with Clarissa’s experiences as a survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Woolf explores the common ground traversed by those with differently gendered and class-inflected experiences of the two great traumas of the early part of the 20th century.

In 2020, as the world went into lockdown in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, readers turned once more to Woolf’s novel, finding resonance and even solace in what Hussey describes as its “sensations of hidden danger, the experiences of loss, of being cut off from other people.” Even more recently, in her keynote lecture at the 2025 International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Sussex, Anne Fernald explored how – a century on from the novel’s first publication – we might read seemingly small acts of danger and desire in Mrs Dalloway as an invitation to take a stand in our own dangerous times. A biography of a novel is a curious genre, but this is a fascinating, engaging and deeply knowledgeable book about the ways that Woolf’s novel can be and has been read both through the window of Woolf’s own time and in our own. Mrs Dalloway is, as Hussey argues in conclusion, a novel about the connections that might exist across the “divides of age, sex, class and experience,” and it continues to speak across those divides to us in what can feel like both lonely and dangerous times today.

Professor Helen Tyson teaches at the University of Sussex. She currently specialises in Virginia Woolf’s scrapbooks, and this year co-organised the 34th annual International Virginia Woolf Conference on ‘Woolf and Dissidence’

• Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey (Manchester University Press, £18.99)
• More book reviews on theartsdesk