In 1914 Leonard settled with an ailing Virginia in Richmond. Situated south of the Thames River, this suburban location removed her from the more feverish activities and encounters of London. The Woolfs took walks regularly, sometimes visiting nearby Kew Gardens, often in the company of their current dog. When she was not ill, Woolf had a daily routine that limited her hours of writing, ensured periods of rest, and varied the sorts of work she did at different times of the day. We might find her writing for a few hours in the morning, then turning to reading in the afternoon, and perhaps retyping drafts later in the day. One variation might be the hand setting of type for the press, Woolf occasionally registered her protest against her protected suburban life, as in this diary entry, which also acknowledges the importance of her social self:
But half the horror is that L. instead of being, as I gathered, sympathetic has the old rigid obstacle—my health. And I cant sacrifice his peace of mind, yet the obstacle is surely now a dead hand, which one should no longer let dominate our short years of life—oh to dwindle them out here, with all these gaps, & abbreviations! Always to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here & wait for Leonard to come in, to spend hours standing at the box of type with Margery, to wonder what its all for . . . For ever to be suburban. L. I don’t think minds any of this as much as I do. But then Lord! . . . . what I owe him! What he gives me! Still, I say, surely we could get more from life than we do—isn’t he too much of a Puritan, of a disciplinarian, doesn’t he through birth & training accept a drastic discipline too tamely, or rather, with too Spartan a self control? There is, I suppose, a very different element in us; my social side, his intellectual side. This social side is very genuine in me. Nor do I think it reprehensible. It is a piece of jewellery I inherit from my mother—a joy in laughter, something that is stimulated, not selfishly wholly or vainly, by contact with my friends. (Diary 2: 250)
She wrote this breakaway diary entry on June 28, 1923—very nearly at the time she set Mrs. Dalloway.
Although London was a restricted destination for Woolf during the first decade of her marriage, the countryside, and especially the rolling hills near the sea in Sussex, were within reach. Having frequented the area since their early courtship, the Woolfs in 1919 purchased Monk’s House in Rodmell as their country retreat. The Mrs. Dalloway manuscript traveled back and forth to Sussex, where Woolf wrote in a garden shed (shared with apples in the loft). Though its present action is set in London, Mrs. Dalloway goes back in memory to a country setting.
By 1924, when in the finishing stages of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia was doing well enough to convince Leonard that they should again reside in London. She took the initiative to find and negotiate for a residence that would house both themselves and the Hogarth Press at 52 Tavistock Square. She recorded her love of the city, so central to her novel in progress, in her diary as she prepared to settle there again: “London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie—music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach, as it hasn’t been since August 1913, when we left Cliffords Inn, for a series of catastrophes which very nearly ended my life, & would, I’m vain enough to think, have ended Leonard’s” (Diary 2: 283).
Connections
WOOLF’S long-restricted but much-cherished social life involved members of the Bloomsbury circle, most of whom (including Leonard) were drawn from the group of young men who had surrounded Woolf’s older brother, Thoby, when he was a student at Cambridge. Now middle-aged like herself, they might come to Richmond on individual visits. They were also likely to gather at various residences in Bloomsbury, or at Virginia’s or Vanessa’s country homes in Sussex. Woolf’s Bloomsbury friends, moving through the decades, included Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell; Vanessa’s lover, the bisexual artist Duncan Grant; the artist, critic, and founder of the arts and crafts Omega Workshop Roger Fry; the biographer Lytton Strachey, who had briefly engaged himself to Virginia, despite being a homosexual; the novelist E. M. Forster; and the noted economist John Maynard Keynes, joined by his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova (a recent addition to the group).
Woolf’s love of gathering with friends would play a part in the design of Mrs. Dalloway, where a party provides the culmination of the day, and the plot. The double dimension of time, which flashes from middle-aged Bloomsbury friendship back to the excitement of youthful acquaintanceship, is also echoed in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway, Richard, Peter Walsh, and Sally Seton move repeatedly in their minds from their middle-aged present, on a single day in London, to intense late-adolescent episodes experienced in the country at Bourton. Both Woolf and numerous critics have noted resources for the characters of Mrs. Dalloway in the Bloomsbury set. Lydia Lopokova, for example, helped Woolf imagine the cultural challenges faced by Rezia, the Italian wife of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, and Rezia bears some of her gestures. In Lytton Strachey, Woolf continued to encounter the man she did not marry, sometimes reflecting on his foibles, as Clarissa does on those of Peter Walsh. Leonard for Virginia, like Richard Dalloway for Clarissa, was the more reliable choice. Such parallels are imperfect, however. Peter’s personality was not at all like Strachey’s, and for it she might have turned more to Clive Bell. Woolf opportunistically transplanted some of Leonard’s experiences as a colonial administrator in Ceylon onto Peter as well, since Peter has just returned to London from his post in India.
Woolf had to look outside Bloomsbury for characters such as Hugh Whitbread, with his allegiance to the society of the royal court, and even for some aspects of Clarissa. Woolf had a model for Hugh in her half brother George Duckworth, who insisted that Virginia accompany him to high-society occasions. These brought torment to Woolf’s teen years, and this is reflected somewhat in the rebellion of Elizabeth Dalloway against her objectification at the Dalloways’ party. Another family friend, introduced to the Stephens via their upper-class Duckworth connection, was Kitty Maxse, sometimes seen as a partial model for Clarissa. Woolf recalled Kitty’s engagement, which occurred during a visit to the family’s vacation house in St. Ives, when Woolf was eight years old. Woolf’s diary records Kitty’s death from a suspicious fall in October 1922, and expresses regret that she hadn’t kept up with this “old friend.” She sets down very distinct memories of “her white hair—pink cheeks—how she sat upright—her voice—with its characteristic tones—her green blue floor—which she painted with her own hands: her earrings, her gaiety, yet melancholy; her smartness: her tears, which stayed on her cheek” (Diary 2: 206). Woolf worried that Clarissa was a “stiff-glittering & tinsely” character and comforted herself that she could bring other characters to her support (Diary 2: 272). Woolf could also study character types and modes of entertainment at a grand country house, Garsington, near Oxford, where Lady Ottoline Morrell entertained her own literary aristocracy. One visit brought out qualities of loathing that suggest the more troubled views of humanity expressed by Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway:
But I cannot describe Garsington. Thirty seven people to tea; a bunch of young men no bigger than asparagus; walking to & fro, round & round; compliments, attentions, & then this slippery mud—which is what interests me at the moment. A loathing overcomes me of human beings—their insincerity, their vanity—A wearisome & rather defiling talk with Ott. last night is the foundation of this complaint—& then the blend in one’s own mind of suavity & sweetness with contempt & bitterness. (Diary 2: 243)
Also during the period of her writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf gained fresh insight into aristocrats through her new friend, later her lover and a significant contributor to the Hogarth Press, Vita Sackville-West.
Work in Progress
AT WORK on Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf strove “to foresee this book better than the others, & get the utmost out of it. I suppose I could have screwed Jacob up tighter if I had foreseen; but I had to make my path as I went” (Diary 2: 209–10). She paced herself by setting goals for scenes to be complete
d in the next month or two, and planning how fiction should take turns with other tasks. “I am beginning Greek again, & must really make out some plan: today 28th [August 1922]: Mrs Dalloway finished on Sat. 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th start Chaucer: Chaucer—that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs D.—if she is to have a next chapter; & shall it be The Prime Minister? Which will last till the week we get back—Say Oct. 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter” (Diary 2: 196).
Woolf’s documentation of her progress in diaries, notebooks, and letters lets us share in the evolution of the novel, her sense of her own method, and her coping with the problems introduced in specific scenes. She thinks of various possible titles, including “At Home” and “The Party,” which eventually become segments of the novel. A third tentative title, “The Hours,” furnished a lasting structure recording the passage of a single day in London, and a recurrent motif of clocks rather savagely slicing out “leaden circles” of time. By early October 1922, “MD [had] branched into a book” from the original two stories. Woolf began to have the idea of creating an unusual double for Mrs. Dalloway in the person of a young clerk, Septimus Smith, who had returned from World War I with a case of shell shock: “I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side” (Diary 2: 207). This changed one plan, “that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party” (Woolf, Introduction 11). We find Woolf negotiating her writing of the most upsetting passages, where she touched closest to her own mental struggles through the depiction of Smith. She reported to a friend, Gwen Raverat, “It was a subject that 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” (Letters 3: 180). The difficult scenes included the “mad scene in Regent’s Park,” where Septimus hallucinates the figure of his fallen commanding officer. For this she found she could write but fifty words a day (Diary 2: 272). She races through Septimus’s suicide scene, as if to protect herself. In February 1923, Woolf reports that she is deriving benefits from the reading she is doing simultaneously: “I wonder if this next lap will be influenced by Proust? I think his French language, tradition, &c, prevents that: yet his command of every resource is so extravagant that one can hardly fail to profit, & must not flinch, through cowardice” (Diary 2: 234). She finds in the writing of fiction the “instant nourishment & well being of my entire day.”
“I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment” (Diary 2: 213). This famous metaphorical description of Woolf’s breakthrough discovery about her method in creating characters, made in the course of writing Mrs. Dalloway, holds many conceptual possibilities. It works on both spatial and temporal planes and among a large set of characters. Taken moment by moment (or scene by scene), it can help us work our way into the experimental nature of this work. Woolf does not mark out chapters for us. She does insert occasional section breaks with a blank line in the text, when there is usually a change of character or scene. Interestingly, two breaks that occur in the British edition of Mrs. Dalloway fail to appear in the American edition, upon which this version is based (see notes for their location). As was her usual practice, Woolf marked up separate sets of proofs for the two publications, and may have worked longer, making more changes, on the British set. Whatever the number, the breaks in the text may encourage us readers to start tunneling in a new direction. Transitions between characters often occur via an experience of the present moment that they share—hearing the tone of one of the many chiming clocks, or the alarming backfire on Bond Street, or watching an airplane doing skywriting far above. These are all forms of connecting in the present moment, as called for in the “tunneling process” (Diary 2: 272).
Writing character at depth was important for Woolf at this stage of her career because Woolf’s Jacob’s Room had been derided by Arnold Bennett, a prominent novelist and critic of the previous generation. His complaint was that “the characters do not vitally survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness” (qtd. Essays 3: 388). Woolf mulls over Bennett’s comment in her diary, considering her potential weaknesses: “People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn’t in J’s R, characters that survive. My answer is—but I leave that to the Nation: its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now. the old post-Dostoevsky argument.” Thus character has changed for modernists—an idea that she would develop further in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” She senses that she isn’t good at the sort of reality Bennett achieves and praises, and she wonders if she has achieved a different sort of “true reality” that is insubstantial (Diary 2: 248). In the same diary entry, she admits, “The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design certainly original, & interests me hugely” (Diary 2: 249). One of the things we might consider is whether it is the approach to character, rather than the characters themselves, that is more memorable in Mrs. Dalloway.
Contending with Ulysses and Qualifying for Modernism
WOOLF’S SUCCESS, on the verge of Mrs. Dalloway, had not come easily, and would not go unchallenged. As she would acknowledge a few years later in A Room of One’s Own, she did have literary foremothers. Some, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and Jane Austen, were quite well known. But with the exception of Austen, she finds that they had all struggled with literary forms and critical criteria that strained against their talents and inclinations. There had been many bestselling women novelists in the late nineteenth century whose names were largely forgotten by the twentieth because they had not been taken seriously by those who determined what would be canonized—what qualified as high culture, deserving of further study. In her frequently cited literary essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf gravitated toward defining and practicing what was “modern.” She distinguished her method from that of “materialist” Edwardian writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Her own generation placed its accent differently—on random atoms of experience as recorded in the mind (155), or “in the dark places of psychology” (156). Despite advocating a new kind of writing, she was not universally welcomed by key makers of high, avant-garde modernism.
Wyndham Lewis is representative of early gatekeepers of modernism who thought of their project in terms of a masculine reclaiming, of culture from decadence and feminization. To him, Mrs. Dalloway presented “puerile copies” of the “realistic vigor” offered by James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses (Men Without Art 138–39). Woolf could certainly have been influenced by Ulysses. She had read parts of the novel as early as 1918, when they were serialized in the Little Review magazine. That same year the Woolfs were offered the manuscript for publication at the Hogarth Press. They turned it down, ostensibly because of its length, but probably also because of their distaste for it. In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf takes Joyce as a primary example of her own generation of writers. She credits him with revealing “the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (155). Her notebooks, “Modern Novels (Joyce),” kept in preparing the earlier version of this essay, have even more positive observations. But in “Modern Fiction,” she does criticize Ulysses, for being “centered in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself.” Woolf also resists “the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency”—a quibble that may register class as well as gender difference between Joyce and Woolf. By the time Ulysses was published in full in 1922, Woolf finds it increasingly “unimportant” and doesn’t “even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings” (Diary 2: 196). It is a “misfire. Genius it has I
think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred.” She imagines a schoolboy “full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious & egotistical that he loses his head” (Diary 2: 199). As was true with her thoughts about Katherine Mansfield, Woolf sees that envy may explain her reaction to Joyce. She concedes, “I was over stimulated by Tom’s [T. S. Eliot’s] praises” of Ulysses (Diary 2: 200).
Eliot’s contacts with the Woolfs began in 1918, and the following year they published a group of his poems. By 1922 they were facilitating what proved a fruitless scheme to release him from his job at a bank in order to work full-time on his writing. In a sketchy account of their conversations about Ulysses, Woolf is particularly attentive to the few negative concessions Eliot makes regarding Joyce: “I said he was virile—a he-goat; but didn’t expect Tom to agree. Tom did tho’; & said he left out many things that were important. . . . Bloom told one nothing. Indeed, he said, this new method of giving the psychology proves to my mind that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells” (Diary 2: 202–3). Of course, Woolf, like Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust, shared the technique of interior monologue with Joyce. Her admiration for his internal flickerings of the mind in “Modern Fiction” seems genuine. Still, in developing this technique, she sought to avoid the “damned egotistical self” she found in both Joyce and Richardson, “narrowing & restricting” their characters (Diary 2: 14).