Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mrs. Dalloway
Book Review: The perfect book for London
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Mrs Dalloway the first time for a class a couple of years ago and fell in love with it on the first page. I recently spent a school quarter in London and was so excited to see this on the syllabus. The tone of this novel suits London beautifully, and I found myself seeing the places the characters visited in a whole new light- The feeling of being lost in Trafalgar Square, or the magical quality of the serpentine in Hyde park were captured so perfectly in by Woolf. I could not imagine a novel better suited to such an incredible city.
That being said, if you have never been or don't plan on ever going to London, still read this book. I have never read a novel in which I felt I knew or understood the characters so intimately. And the language and words she uses, even just the mechanical syntax of Woolf's sentances, are brilliant. Her words pour through the novel like waves, and the descriptions are vivid and heartbreaking. I felt so sad finishing this novel, and yet, it ended exactly as it should have. But I confess, the instant it was over I turned back to the first page and read it again!
I understand why some people don't like this novel. The stream of conciousness can be a little difficult (although I never had any problem figuring out who was talking, like some people said). But I find it refreshing to read something wholly different from not only writers of Woolf's time, but even writers today. The use of stream of conciousness is very different from, say, James Joyce, or other authors who write in this style. And it definitly breaks away from the typical formula novels that dominate most library and bookstore shelves. All in all, read this book. At best, you'll fall in love with it like I did, and at worst, it's a quick read so you didn't waste much time.
Book Review: Two Universes Overlap
Summary: 5 Stars
Clarissa Dalloway plans a party for her high society friends in London just after the First World War. Some friends attend and Clarissa may or may not have gained some self-insight. That basically is the plot of CLARISSA DALLOWAY. But Virginia Woolf took this marginal sequence of events and created not just one but two separate and overlapping universes with it. To do this, Woolf avoided the conventional linear approach to fiction that had characterized novel writing until the jangling horrors of the War caused a number of very intellectual minds to suddenly pay some serious attention to the pioneering books of Freud and Jung with the result that the inner recesses of the mind opened up a brand new way to think, to perceive, and as a result to write. Woolf, of course, was not the first fiction writer to do this. James Joyce did much the same with his ULYSSES, but Woolf in her more controlled way of keeping straight in the reader's mind who was doing what improved on this free associational way to write so that readers could follow the Byzantine labyrinth of Clarissa's synaptic pathways and experience in real time what she does.
Clarissa is a middle-aged woman who obsesses over the past. When a passionate lover offered her marriage years ago, she turned him down for the predictable dullness of another. When Clarissa had the opportunity to have a lesbian affair when she was a teenager, she turned that down too. Her life has been pretty much the same, and now at fifty-two, she pauses to wonder--perhaps not too deeply--whether the fault may be hers. Is she inherently sterile? Clarissa does not possess the needed objectivity to get too close but the reader certainly does. Clarissa has spent a lifetime perfecting the fine art of erecting insurmountable walls around herself that no one even knows are there. Perhaps part of the reason is that she has bought into the pre-Victorian world life of servants, massive formal parties, and a life spent in a hurry going nowhere. Clarissa is not an evil woman, nor does she maliciously plot against others, but she is lacking the emotional spark of life that might infuse her soul with meaning. At her parties, which she plans with a vengeance, she is articulate and vivacious, both qualities which hide her essential internal fears rather than emphasize her non-existent external charm. Connection is beyond her.
While Clarissa occupies her universe of stasis, Woolf creates an adjacent universe of angst, separated from each other by a spatial and temporal bag of literary tricks that Woolf uses with masterly skill. Occupying this other world is Septimus Warren Smith, a survivor of the War but only in a physical sense. Inside he is a wreck, emptied of human feeling, unable to communicate with his new wife, and crying out loudly and plainly that he wants only to die. He never meets Clarissa though he is invited to her party. What they share are their private worlds of pain that connect to the reader if not to each other. They both hear the tolling of Big Ben, and they link, not solid as in a chain but metaphorically as in a dream. His death by suicide does not close his universe totally; a bit of it remains within Clarissa as she hears ever so briefly of it, almost as if in passing. His death lets her know that her life was very nearly as sterile as his was; at least it would if she were more perceptive, but she is not and that is the true tragedy of Clarissa. Sometimes one has to die just to give another a chance at life. Virginia Woolf says this better than anyone else has.
Book Review: 'fear no more the heat of the sun'
Summary: 5 Stars
I just finished the Hours after reading Ms. Dalloway, and while both are excellent books, I can't help but feel that there is something seriously wrong with the conclusions of the books.
The protagonist females in both books focus on singular events as the locus for happiness in life, a secret kiss and a moment by the sea, and the unimpeachable quality of those moment in youth, leads to self doubt and pining for what might have been; As the hours drip by, one at a time.
There is a quite obvious tint of mental illness to most of the main characters in both books, a sense of dread and foreboding of the horrors each passing hour might bring, of the steadying drum of moment upon moment upon moment eating away at some fundamental sense of self, to the extent that death, the cessation of the present, begins to sound like sweet relief. This is an intriguing but terrible perspective. Life often offers up obstacles that appear insurmountable, yet these obstacles are only ever truly insurmountable if we choose not to climb them, if we turn away from the promise of the future, our prior experiences or neuroses filling us with bilious dread of what could pass, allowing the siren song of death's quiet to lull into the dreariest of complicacy.
Life is a vivid array of opportunities, each hour of each day could offer a wonderful moment, or it could just be enjoyed for what it is. 5pm on a Tuesday in October may not offer a moment in which everything will make sense and be good, but it may offer a phone call from a friend you haven't seen in a while, or a red tailed hawk swooping down in the brush by the road as you drive home to grab a vole, or anything small but meaningful that tells you, that your life, all life, has purpose.
The quality of the book is unimpeachable, but the quality of the message can be called into question.
"...fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extrodinary night! She felt somehow very like him-- the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air"
Book Review: A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time. The first time I read it years ago (as so many seem to have done) when The Hours came out. At that time, I found it interesting, though not easy-going reading. Now I read it for a class and enjoyed it even more having learned a bit more about Woolf and her life and her theories of literature.
Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's attempt to get beneath the surfaces of human beings, to show all the emotions and thoughts that go one in peoples' minds even on the most ordinary of days and while they are involved in the most mundane of tasks. Each life becomes a complex, beautiful thing when examined in this life.
Woolf also said she was trying to show the sane and the insane side by side in this novel which, comparing the characters of Mrs. Dalloway and the shell-shocked Septimus Smith--the two have much in common despite the great differences in their lives and ways.
The book is worth reading for the insight Woolf provides into the human condition and for the poetry of language with which she expresses it. Having read Jacob's Room just prior to this book (and which she wrote just prior to this one) it's possible to see how Woolf progressed as a writer and as a stylist. Next on the list is "To the Lighthouse," which, I'm told, shows Woolf even more at the top of her form. Can't wait.
Book Review: Not a good choice for your first Virginia Woolf novel
Summary: 1 Stars
I've never read any of Woolf's novels (or seen The Hours). I recently obtained a copy of Mrs. Dalloway. I was really looking forward to reading something by Virginia Woolf and I really liked the idea of the story taking place over the course of one day. Unfortunately, this was a very tedious and boring day. "Dense" is used in many of these reviews and it is certainly apt. I normally enjoy stream of consciousness, but the writing was extremely meandering and repetetive. At times I felt like I was reading some writing student's homework assignment where the task was to write as many metaphors for one thing as you possibly could. Descriptions were beaten to death. The absence of spacing to differentiate between each character's thought process makes for unnecessary confusion.
This has really put me off wanting to read anything else written by Woolf if this is her regular style. Perhaps this was a poor choice as an introductory novel to her works? All I took away from this novel was the impression that Woolf had a huge obsession with semi-colons.