Mrs Dalloway The Secret Life of Books

CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC

In 1917, as the First World War raged in France,

the writer Virginia Woolf took her daily walk

across the Sussex countryside.

Although a long way from the conflict,

she could hear guns echoing across the English Channel -

and reports from the front line affected her deeply.

For the rest of her life,

she would look for ways of writing about this violence and breakage.

Virginia Woolf came of age as a writer at a strange time -

when Europe was so shaken it barely knew itself.

In these uncertain years, the Victorian novel, with its firm

plots and knowable characters seemed out of place.

Woolf sensed the need for change.

Everything was going to be new,

everything was going to be different.

Everything was on trial.

Dividing her writing life between this quiet stretch of Sussex

and a home in London, Virginia Woolf would play a leading role

in a literary revolution.

Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925,

would help change our thinking about what a novel could be

and how it could be written.

In writing this book, Woolf would tackle subjects close to her heart.

Reading her manuscripts and diaries, I'm going to follow her

through the ups and downs of the creative process

and catch a glimpse of a great writer at work

as she brings a radical new novel to life.

"Big Ben strikes. First a warning, musical;

"then the hour, irrevocable.

"The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

"In people's eyes,

"in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar;

"the carriages, motor cars, sandwich men shuffling and swinging.

"This was what she loved - life; London; this moment of June."

When Virginia Woolf started to write Mrs Dalloway in 1922,

she was already a respected writer and reviewer.

But she sensed that this was going to be her "high summer",

this was her moment.

If she was going to make a mark on the literary world,

it had to be now.

The story unfolds over the course of a single day in London.

It dips in and out of many different lives

but focuses on two people in particular.

Part of Woolf's audacity is that these people never meet.

There's Clarissa Dalloway,

a society hostess, the wife of a Conservative MP,

and she's going to be throwing a lavish party in the evening.

And then there's Septimus Warren Smith.

A shell-shocked soldier, whose honourable military career

is about to come to a tragic end.

BIG BEN CHIMES

The regular chimes of Big Ben punctuate the novel,

ringing out across the city,

linking disparate people as they pause to register the time.

Now, it must be said

that the plot of this novel doesn't sound very promising.

A man walks around London - a woman prepares for a party

and receives a visit from someone she didn't marry.

Time passes.

But what makes Mrs Dalloway so inventive isn't the plot itself -

but the way that it's written -

and the way that all the different strands of it relate.

Parallel stories,

parallel lives. Linked only by a web of associations.

Mrs Dalloway would be a risk but it echoed the mood of the times.

Britain had emerged from the First World War a damaged nation.

The term "shell shock" first appeared in newspaper reports

in 1922, the year Virginia Woolf began Mrs Dalloway.

It resonated with what she already knew -

that the past is always

with us, that memory persists, that something fundamental had changed,

something that could not be healed by victory parades and bunting.

So, at this very tense time in the early 1920s,

it feels like all society is facing, in a way, two directions,

thinking back over the war, looking ahead.

This is a time when several writers, of whom Woolf's one,

are very self-consciously

experimenting with new kinds of writing which are supposed to be,

sort of, adequate to a new modern world,

and doing so in quite a rivalrous way.

How much was she in conscious competition, then,

with other writers, do you think?

She herself, if you read her letters, was quite, sort of,

unsettled by the experiments of the other,

sort of, great modernist writers of the period.

So, TS Eliot is coming round, reading The Waste Land aloud.

I mean, that must have felt quite a challenge.

Yeah, you might think it was a privilege.

But I think it's a bit scary, too!

So what did she do differently, then?

Well, I think what she tried to do, in fiction, was to find

a form for the novel which was true, really, to the way people thought

rather than what they did or what they said.

It's an extraordinary, sort of, map of internal plots

and people's dialogues with themselves,

rather than what's going on in the exterior world.

"She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged.

"She sliced like a knife through everything,

"at the same time was outside looking on.

"She had a perpetual sense of being out, far out to sea and alone."

There's a powerful sense of feelings throttled and of lives disappointed.

It's partly about the way the English stiff upper lip...

-Totally.

-..has affected our internal emotional lives.

-Totally.

And the stiff upper-lipness of it, I think, is really conscious.

There's an extraordinary bit near the beginning of the novel where

Clarissa Dalloway is thinking about the war,

when she remembers Lady Bexborough

who opened a bazaar with a telegram in her hand, "they said."

And "they said" brilliantly lets you see that Lady Bexborough

is almost admired for the fact that the telegram,

which tells that her son has died, he's been killed in the war,

-doesn't stop her doing her duty of opening the bazaar.

-Carrying on.

-Yes.

-Yes.

And that seems such a, sort of, unflinching image of,

kind of, how feeling is controlled and conquered in the novel.

"Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing,

"the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day,

"counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out

"in a chorus the supreme advantages of having a sense of proportion."

By setting her novel on a single day

punctuated by the chimes of Big Ben on the hour,

Woolf was giving herself a definite framework,

a solid shape and structure within which she could deal

with some very difficult things, not only the trauma of war,

but, also, some of her own hardest and least containable experiences.

While Clarissa Dalloway rejoices in London life,

Septimus sees the city very differently.

A busy street becomes a nightmarish visions of the trenches.

There are men trapped in mines, women burned alive

and brutality blaring out on placards.

In writing Septimus, Virginia Woolf was drawing on personal experience.

Woolf had a breakdown aged 13, following the death of her mother.

And episodes of mental illness would recur for the rest of her life.

At times she was bedridden, plagued by voices and hallucinations.

Virginia Woolf saw many doctors in the course of her life,

so she was well aware of how the medical profession

struggled to understand and treat mental illness.

In the passages where Septimus is being examined by experts,

you can really feel her own frustration coming through.

"When he felt like that, he went to the Music Hall, said Dr Holmes.

"He took a day off with his wife and played golf.

" 'Why not try two tablets of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime?'

"No, there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter."

BIG BEN CHIMES

Woolf wrote into the character of Septimus

some of her own disturbing episodes,

merging her private illness with a public story

and taking control of her experience by writing about it.

Virginia Woolf was torn between the infectious vivacity of London

and her desire for solitude and space.

At Monk's House, in Rodmell, East Sussex,

she found an antidote to the city.

When she was at Monk's House, work happened here -

in a shed at the bottom of the garden.

For her, writing was an addiction.

She took to it, she once said, "as some people do to gin."

Woolf took great joy in a well-organised day.

From ten until one was her inviolable time for writing.

She'd tune-up first with a cigarette

and then think through the first words.

In the afternoon she'd often go for a walk, sometimes miles

and miles, saying over to herself the sentences she'd been writing

that morning, letting the rhythm of them fall in tune with her step.

And then, in the evening, there would be immersive reading,

perhaps literature or history.

And some image or tempo from Shakespeare might start

the tune for the next morning's writing.

As a publisher and reviewer,

Woolf was well aware of new work by other contemporary writers.

Setting Mrs Dalloway over the course of a single day in a city

was a riposte to James Joyce, whose epic novel, Ulysses,

charts a day in the life of two men in Dublin.

Woolf read and wrote about Joyce's novel in 1922,

just when the first ideas were forming for Mrs Dalloway.

And she was certainly intrigued by it.

She acknowledged Joyce's brilliance.

She couldn't help feeling it was rather pretentious.

She wrote frankly in her diary that she was about as irritated

by it as by "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

But she knew that, like Joyce, she was attempting something new

and with all innovations there are risks.

In a diary entry for June 1923,

Virginia Woolf reflected on the progress of her novel.

"I foresee this is going to be the devil of a struggle.

"The design is so queer and so masterful.

"It is certainly original and interests me hugely."

Woolf wrote the first drafts of Mrs Dalloway

in three large notebooks, now held here, at the British Library.

To turn the pages is about as close as we can get to witnessing

a great novel taking shape.

One of the striking things, actually, is the book itself.

I do my writing on, you know, pre-produced A4 pads.

But Virginia Woolf loved the feel of books

so she always hand bound her notebooks.

There's a wonderful sense of the, the book as an object.

And, of course, Virginia Woolf was a bookmaker,

running a press with her husband, Leonard.

She knew about the feel of books

and she wanted to write her own in good notebooks.

The first page - "The Hours?"

And The Hours stayed in her mind as the title of this book.

She kept swapping between The Hours and Mrs Dalloway,

as if she's wondering whether the central thing here is to do

with the passing of time, across a whole city, a whole nation,

or whether it's actually this one woman and how everything else

is going to impinge on her personal, private, emotional life.

This is...recognizably Mrs Dalloway,

but not quite as we know it.

She starts rather solemnly, with a procession of young boys,

the sons of dead officers,

coming away from laying wreaths at the Cenotaph.

The mood is very sombre.

"Silence falls on London and falls on the mind.

"Time flaps at the mast."

And, of course, we know that later Woolf decided to begin instead

with Clarissa, going out into the June morning to hold back

that feeling of war for later, to come at it, I think,

more obliquely and all the more powerfully for that.

It's so exciting to see Woolf's pen just dashing across the page.

You can see the places where she clearly knows exactly what

she wants to say.

And then there are pauses and crossings out, hesitations.

In a sense, actually,

this manuscript is like another sort of diary

because she's marking the date in the margin so we can see

almost day-by-day what she's thinking and what she's writing.

Do you know, we've even got a quick pencil sketch of a floor plan

for one of the houses that Virginia Woolf is

thinking of renting in London.

The wonderful sense of the rest of her life going on at the same

time as trying to write this book.

I think we can see, particularly, actually, that the

passages with Septimus are really heavily worked, particularly

those places where Septimus is having his hallucinations,

where he's going to Harley Street and seeing the doctors.

You can see the hesitations, lots and lots of different versions.

Sometimes during the periods of her illness, she wasn't able to write.

I think we get a feeling for two battles going on at once here -

Woolf's working at her limits as a writer,

cajoling all of this disparate material into a new form.

And at the same time, quite inseparably, she's finding

a way of writing about the illness she'd never

written about in this way before.

In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to write about what

she knew, but to bring the whole world into it.

She wanted, she said, "to make people talk about everything in

"the whole of life so that one's hair stands on end

"in a drawing room".

It was quite a challenge.

The central character didn't come easily.

Woolf faltered, she almost abandoned the book in a dismal moment

when Clarissa seemed "too stiff, too glittering and tinselly".

Then she had a breakthrough - she invented Clarissa's memories.

She showed how rapidly,

involuntarily, all kinds of scenes from the past come into mind.

And through those memories we learn about Clarissa's old flame,

Peter Walsh, who's just come back from India

and is coming to her party.

We learn about the mesmerizing Sally Seaton who Clarissa loved

and kissed.

We get a sense of some of her frustration that marriage has

made her Mrs Richard Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more.

We share, I think, some of her yearning for all the lives

she might have led - her wistful reflections on the paths not taken.

Woolf's diaries reveal that the character of Clarissa Dalloway

may have been shaped by the unexpected death of a family friend.

The circumstances were ambiguous -

reports said she had fallen over the banisters.

I wonder how important you think it was that the family friend

-of her youth, Kitty Maxse...

-Yes.

-..died just

when she was starting to write Mrs Dalloway?

She was the young woman Virginia Woolf should have been

brought up to be.

She was the young woman her mother had approved of,

who'd made the right kind of marriage.

And had been a sort of model of rectitude and good manners.

But that marriage didn't turn out terribly well.

And I don't think she would have been terribly surprised

if Kitty had somehow fallen...

..by accident on purpose to her death.

And so that there is a sense of being very close up to death,

that's very important, I think, for the novel.

So, Clarissa is a curious blend of Kitty Maxse,

who Virginia Woolf didn't love, and something of herself.

Virginia Woolf had her own domestic choices to make.

Yes, and she writes one letter when she's 29 to her sister Vanessa Bell.

It's a very depressed letter saying, "to be 29 and unmarried".

-And she was, of course, very beautiful...

-Very beautiful.

..could have seduced anybody she wanted.

She could have. And then Leonard Woolf came on the scene.

And, I think, she was not in love with him initially.

But she took him very seriously.

This was a man she could marry.

He was not what her family would have expected,

because he was Jewish and he had no money.

So that's what she writes defiantly when she agrees to marry him -

she writes, "I'm going to marry a penniless Jew".

And yet they were together as writers.

And I remember Woolf saying that this marriage would work,

"because he has written a novel and so have I".

And this is how they saw it.

JAUNTY 1920S MUSIC

Virginia Woolf completed her redrafts for Mrs Dalloway

amidst the bustle and breeziness of Bloomsbury.

She revelled in being back at the centre of things with music,

talk and city views once again within her reach.

When Woolf finished the novel, in good health, in October 1924,

she could congratulate herself.

In a sense, it was a triumph over the illness she'd been

writing about.

And she'd even met the deadline she'd punctiliously

set herself six months before.

Big Ben strikes and dusk descends across the city.

There's a sense of magic and carnival in the air.

And, at last, we arrive at Mrs Dalloway's party.

BACKGROUND LAUGHTER

Here, the lives of the society hostess

and the shell-shocked soldier will finally coincide.

The party is a summing up of Clarissa's life.

People she has known across many, many years come together in it.

It's a glittering social occasion filled with everyone who's anyone

in the British Establishment, even the Prime Minister.

Clarissa is in her element, a magnetic presence

at the centre of things, drawing all her guests together.

CHATTER AND LAUGHTER

But the gaiety is interrupted by the news that

"a young man has killed himself".

The shell-shocked Septimus has leapt from his bedroom window

and fallen to his death on the railings below.

Suddenly, in the midst of the party among the life

and the laughter, there is death, shocking, palpable, inescapable.

"Up had flashed the ground, through him,

"blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes.

"There he lay, with a thud, thud, thud in his brain,

"and then a suffocation of blackness."

Clarissa steps aside from her party.

She senses something disturbingly familiar in this stranger's death.

Woolf originally intended that Clarissa would kill herself,

or that, perhaps, she would die at the end of her party.

But then she decided to swap things round.

In fact, Septimus would be the one to die and Clarissa would live.

This becomes, then, a novel about Clarissa's survival.

Woolf calls the book, Mrs Dalloway, naming it after the woman who lives.

She makes it, in a sense, a book about a resurrection.

By bringing Clarissa and Septimus together in the final scene,

Woolf delivers a powerful social critique.

The party is full of members of The Establishment -

it's what young men like Septimus fought and died for.

His death is a disaster that belongs to all of us -

it's society's collective disgrace.

Virginia Woolf makes Clarissa walk back into the crowded party.

After all the complexity of the novel,

the last line is as simple as they come.

" 'It is Clarissa'... for there she was."

Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925.

Virginia Woolf could finally hold a copy in her hands - she had done it.

Allowing herself a moment of excitement, she wrote in her diary -

"I wonder if this time, I have achieved something?

"I might have become one of the interesting...

"I will not say great, but interesting novelists."

Mrs Dalloway sold well, outstripping all Woolf's previous publications

and establishing her as a major modern writer.

It paid for the installation of hot water at Rodmell and even for

a loo which was for ever afterwards known as Mrs Dalloway's closet.

But it did much more than that.

As generations read and reread the novel,

they came to appreciate the design more clearly.

They saw the achievement of having written Septimus,

not only as Clarissa's opposite but also, in some ways, as her double.

They saw the audacity of suggesting that Clarissa, the respectable socialite,

also felt very like the young man who had killed himself.

With hindsight there's an inescapable resonance

between the final scene of Mrs Dalloway, and Woolf's own life.

In 1941, Virginia Woolf, aged 59 and one of the greatest writers

of the 20th century, would walk out across the Sussex meadows.

She did not wish to come back.

Her body would be found in the River Ouse three weeks later.

Virginia Woolf's death has become perhaps the most famous

part of her life.

But it's certainly not her greatest legacy.

She found narrative form for all those acrobatic flights

of thought and association that go on in our minds all the time.

She even taught us to read in a new ways, negotiating gaps

and uncertainties.

Looking at the manuscripts,

going back through the diaries, I've got a clearer sense than

ever before of just how bold Woolf was in her writing.

And I really think that these amazing documents give us a powerful

sense of just what it took to write what had never been written before.

I think it would give her great pleasure to know that,

almost a century on,

we are still captivated by her vision of life,

London, this moment of June.

To dig deeper into Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

and the other books in this series a free App from

The Open University is available to download.

Go to...

And follow the links to The Open University.