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A Lifetime of Lessons in “Mrs. Dalloway”

By Jenny Offill

In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote about a peculiarity that runs through all real works of art. The books of certain writers (she was speaking of Charlotte Brontë at the time) seem to shape-shift with each reading. The plot might become comfortingly familiar, but the emotional revelations within it change. Scenes once passed over as unimportant begin to prickle with new meaning, as if time itself had been the missing ingredient for understanding them. Woolf went on to describe the works she returned to again and again:

At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

For me, “ Mrs. Dalloway ” is such a book, one to which I have mapped the twists and turns of my own autobiography over the years. Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering. Instead, some forgotten facet of the story comes to light, and the feeling is always that of having blurred past something that was right in front of me.

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This is because “Mrs. Dalloway” is a remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains. In fact, on the surface, it sounds suspiciously dull. The novel depicts a single day in June from the perspective of a number of characters. The year is 1923. The Great War is over, but the memory of its unprecedented destruction still hangs over England. In a posh part of London, a middle-aged woman plans a party. She goes out to get flowers. A man she almost married drops by for a visit. She is snubbed by an acquaintance. She remembers an alluring girl she once kissed. Later, guests pour into her house for the party. In the midst of all this, she hears news of a stranger’s violent death. In between these modest plot points, Clarissa Dalloway wanders around London, lies down for a rest, and takes note of Big Ben striking out the hours again and again.

But, wait, I am leaving out everything. Let me go back to the beginning.

The first time I read Virginia Woolf, it was for extraliterary reasons. I knew she had gone mad. I wanted to know how, exactly. Some dark wing was crossing over me that fall. The middle register of experience had abruptly fallen away. I didn’t need to sleep anymore, it seemed. My brain buzzed and whirred in terrifying ways. Everything seemed connected to everything else, but in ways I didn’t dare try to explain. I was seventeen, I think, eighteen maybe. I worked an early shift at a bakery, and I’d ride there on my bike before dawn, the whoosh of the darkness soft and creaturely around me. Why are you crying for no reason? I’d think, brushing my hands across my face.

I suspected I should tell someone about the buzzing and the whirring and the crying, but I couldn’t work up the nerve. Instead, I went to the university library one night and checked out books I thought might contain clues about what was in store for me. “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of them. Before I sat down to read it properly, I opened it at random, and this sentence was given occultly to me: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

I could feel my loneliness recede slightly as I read the words.

I backtracked to the first introduction of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked soldier, loosely tethered to the world, into whom Woolf had poured many of her own experiences of madness. In the first scene, he is standing on the same street as Mrs. Dalloway. They do not know each other (they will never meet), but, in this one moment, they are briefly connected, both startled by the sound of a car backfiring. Here is our first glimpse of him:

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? Yes, this. Exactly this, I thought. I started the book over from the beginning and found that the darkness gathering around Septimus was woven into other narrative threads, ones I was less interested in. All these old people talking about houses and parties and hats—what did they have to do with me? I skimmed over these other stories, noting here and there the stunning beauty of the language, then raced ahead to find more Septimus sections. His thoughts, blazingly sad, seemed beautiful to me. I wrapped myself in an old blanket and read through the night, hoping it wouldn’t end badly for him.

I didn’t return to “Mrs. Dalloway” again until I was in my thirties, when I was on a different kind of quest. I was a wife and the mother of a young child, and, after years of living alone, I found myself suddenly, startlingly mired in the domestic. My days at home with my daughter were full of emotion yet anecdote-less. I wanted to write a novel about this feeling, which was one of want amid plenty, but I worried it would not make a good book, that it would be too trivial. I’d had an idea before my daughter was born that I would keep a diary during the early years. I imagined it structured like a kind of ledger. On one side it would read “In the House” and, on the other, “In the World.”

A poet friend of mine had stamps made up with these phrases imprinted on them and gave them to me just after my daughter was born. But after only a month, I abandoned the idea. I hated to see the blank space where my impressions of life in the world should have been. It was February, blizzarding, and I stayed shut inside most days with the baby. But still I kept wondering how to do it, how to tear down this screen between House and World. What would a philosophical novel set in a domestic sphere look like? Stupidly, I did not think of “Mrs. Dalloway,” which I remembered narrowly as a book about madness. But then, one day, I reread Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels,” from 1919. It is a manifesto of sorts, and I found it spoke directly to me. (Six years later, she would put many of these ideas into play when she wrote “Mrs. Dalloway.”)

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

I loved this idea of recording the atoms as they fell, of registering each one, however small a moment it appeared to be. Woolf’s insight seemed sneakily mystical to me. Many mystic traditions teach that the distinctions between the mundane and the sublime are more porous than we imagine: if one is truly awake, these differences cease to be apparent.

Once I started noticing this idea, I found traces of this collapsing of scale throughout the modernist canon. Robert Walser wrote about how Cézanne’s genius lay in “placing in the same ‘temple’ things both large and small.” And Picasso said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things.”

But it was in “Mrs. Dalloway” that this radical levelling of high and low found its most thrilling expression for me. I returned to it as a model for the domestic novel that I hoped to write. Woolf’s brilliant soaring sentences were a far cry from my modest, pared-down ones, but the leaps in consciousness, the insistence on the importance of the half-seen, of the subterranean feeling, of the quicksilver joys and sorrows of domestic life was a revelation. This time around, I cared less for Septimus and his grand soliloquies about human nature and death. I knew his story moved deathward at a mighty clip. Instead, I was hungry for signs of life. This time, I lingered over Clarissa’s delight in the incidental things that crossed her path: the laughing girls taking their “absurd woolly dogs” for a run; the aging dowagers in motorcars off on “errands of mystery”; and, on the pond, “the slow-swimming happy ducks.” This time, I was interested in the old people talking about houses and parties (though the hats still left me cold). I started to ask myself, as I pushed my daughter on a swing or bought pork chops or counted out change at the bodega, Wait, what is the exact nature of this moment? Or, in short, What would Virginia Woolf do?

And now, fifteen years later, I find myself wandering through the emotional landscape of this novel again. The novelty is that I am nearly the same age as Mrs. Dalloway, who has “just broken into her fifty-second year.” I find myself marvelling less over the sweeping insights of the novel and more over the intricate delights of its language and form. I keep thinking about the shocking velocity of Woolf’s sentences, how they rocket off into the sky, trailing sparks of emotion behind them. I keep thinking about how beautifully, how gracefully, how ecstatically, even, she makes use of dashes and commas and parentheses to capture the halting stutter-step of feeling being transmuted into thought. But there are still, of course, the uneasier pleasures of reading some biting insight on the page and wondering if it applies to me.

This time, I am pricked by the passage in which Clarissa’s old flame, Peter Walsh, describes how getting older has changed him. He talks about how it is a relief to retreat from the obsessiveness of his youthful passions:

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal.

So much less personal! I will be fifty-two this year, and this phrase needles me. Perhaps this is because I, like Clarissa, have never been good at detachment. I once found my own relationship to entanglements succinctly described in two lines of a Gary Lutz short story. “Are you involved with anyone?” a character is asked. “Everybody,” he answers. To become less personal strikes me as a terrible fate, though Peter Walsh speaks of it calmly, as if it is a pleasant thing. But how could it be pleasant to withdraw from this blooming, buzzing world of people? Woolf seems to imply that this desire for distance grows gradually, almost imperceptibly, as you get older—until, one day, you find yourself noticing the petals of the flowers instead of the person holding the bouquet. I’d like to think she’s wrong about this, that for once her insights do not apply to me. (Then I remember how one paragraph ago I was lingering not on the vivid characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” but on the suppleness of its dashes, the beauty of its commas, the grace of its parentheses.)

This essay was drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “ Mrs. Dalloway ,” which is out in January, from Penguin Classics .

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Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution

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By Michael Cunningham

• Dec. 23, 2020

Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” is a revolutionary novel of profound scope and depth, about a day in the life of a woman who runs a few errands, sees an old suitor and gives a dull party. It’s a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials.

Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA.

With “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf asserted as well that we are all embarked on epic journeys of our own, even though, to the untrained eye, some of us, many of us, might look as if we’re only there to tidy up or to do our best to amuse our bosses.

Woolf knew that questions of scale are relative — that the movements of heavenly bodies seen through a telescope are not any more mysterious or revelatory than those of subatomic particles seen through a microscope. Each is an all but imponderable vastness. Each is in constant motion according to a series of apparently cogent, but by no means fully comprehensible, rules and principles. Only God, and a handful of mortals, understand that the differences between a proton and the planet Jupiter are negligible, if we eliminate the essentially irrelevant factor of mass.

But what, then, about “Mrs. Dalloway” itself? It’s one thing to maintain that Woolf created a profound and revolutionary novel out of a single day in the life of a relatively conventional person. It’s one thing to say that the book may have about as much to do with discovering the laws of human physics as it does with traditional narrative.

It’s another thing to ask ourselves: How, exactly, did she do that?

In “Mrs. Dalloway” we follow Clarissa, a society hostess, well-heeled and gracious, a little false, no longer young, as she walks through London on a balmy day in June. Like Clarissa herself, neither the day’s tasks nor the evening’s party is particularly auspicious. London, after all, produces 30 June days every year, and you could say that for Clarissa, the wife of a Conservative member of Parliament, giving parties is simply part of her job description.

Still. If in “Mrs. Dalloway” there’s no such thing as an insignificant person, there is, as well, no such thing as a usual day. Clarissa’s pleasant but seemingly unextraordinary day is nevertheless infused with “life; London; this moment of June.” One ignores the marvels of all three, in their lyrically descending order, at risk to one’s soul.

Yet “Mrs. Dalloway” is considerably more than a paean to the daily beauties. If it were strictly a celebration of life, however exquisitely written, we wouldn’t have this much use for it so many decades after it was published, in 1925. If “Mrs. Dalloway” is a swooningly gorgeous book, it is also a dark and disquieting one.

For one thing, “Mrs. Dalloway” is haunted by the restless ghosts of the living. There’s Peter Walsh, the man Clarissa might have married but didn’t; Sally Seton, the woman with whom she might have allowed herself to fall in love (but didn’t); and Septimus Warren Smith, a delusional, shellshocked veteran of World War I, who walks through London on the same day, in the same general vicinity, as Clarissa, but whom Clarissa never actually meets.

Along with its most prominent characters, “Mrs. Dalloway” is almost as densely populated as a novel by Charles Dickens. In “Mrs. Dalloway”’s London, consciousness passes from one character to another in more or less the way a baton is passed among members of a relay race. If, for instance, a young Scottish woman, newly arrived in London, wanders lost and disconsolate through Regent’s Park, we briefly enter her mind, feel her unhappiness (“the stone basins, the prim flowers … all seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer. … She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen”) until she is noticed by an older woman, at which moment we switch to the consciousness of the old woman, who, envying the first woman’s youth, mourns the loss of her own (“it’s been a hard life. … What hadn’t she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too.”) until we are snapped back to Clarissa, as she returns home to learn she has not been invited to an exclusive, politically inspired luncheon.

Prominent among the novel’s wonders is Clarissa herself, a person more likely, in other novels, to appear as a trivial, foolish and peripheral character. Woolf’s Clarissa, however, although possessed of foolish and trivial aspects, is also capable of feeling this: “She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. 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, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

The world of “Mrs. Dalloway” is not in any way a simple, or simplified, world. If, as Henry James put it, a writer is someone “on whom nothing is lost,” one might presume to add, in Woolf’s name, that a writer is also someone on whom no one is lost . All the people who appear in “Mrs. Dalloway,” however peripherally, are visiting the book from unwritten novels of their own, the tales of their trials and triumphs, even though, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” they may occupy less than a paragraph, may appear only as a discouraged man who contemplates saying a prayer at St. Paul’s Cathedral, or as an impoverished Irishwoman who speculates, gleefully, over which exalted personage occupies the royal motor car as it rumbles past her on a crowded street.

The book encompasses, as well, almost infinite shades and degrees of happiness, loss, satisfaction, regret and tragedy. It invokes, over and over, the choices we make, those that are made for us by others, and their sometimes lifelong ramifications, many of which we could not possibly have imagined at the time.

Would Clarissa’s life have been more fulfilling had she married Peter, a mercurial romantic, instead of the more solid, if rather unexciting, Richard Dalloway?

It seems safe to say that Clarissa’s life would have been markedly different if she’d pursued Sally beyond a single, covert, girlhood kiss, but would life as a same-sex couple in the 1920s have been a better life?

Whatever might pass for regret or nostalgia is rescued by Woolf’s respect for the ambiguous and the unknowable. If a good-enough novel shows us where its characters went wrong, a great novel is more likely to eschew the very notion that anyone can be seen, with any degree of certainty, to have gone either “right” or “wrong.” Under “Mrs. Dalloway”’s brilliantly crafted surface is a chaos of decisions made and not made, of the consequences of both, and of the uncountable parallel lives lived silently, invisibly, alongside our own.

And so we have Peter Walsh, still mooning over the Clarissa he lost, decades earlier. We have Richard Dalloway, mooning over the Clarissa he won but who evades him still, after many years of marriage. We find ourselves in a world in which the past is neither more nor less than a present that occurred in another time; a world in which it’s all but impossible to distinguish the missed opportunity from the narrow escape.

Maybe the book’s most singular innovation, however, is the alternating stories of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who do not know of each other’s existence until the very end, when Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s party as a true ghost, not only disembodied but nameless, nothing left of him but his suffering and his violent end. At the very last moment, their lives converge, but only across the divide of mortality itself.

While Septimus is still alive, though, we move back and forth between the utter veracity of Clarissa’s domain, which can run to the banal, and the tumultuous delusions of Septimus’s, where a little banality might be a welcome relief.

Though seldom discussed as such, “Mrs. Dalloway” is one of the great novels of World War I. Woolf always intended it to be set in London just after the war — in an England that had lost hundreds of thousands of people; in a London in which, partly owing to new weapons like mustard gas and flamethrowers, the streets after Armistice were crowded with sons, husbands and fathers who’d returned from combat alive but so maimed as to be unrecognizable. Woolf was too squeamish (or respectful) to include such details, but I’ve always found it illuminating to remember that on the streets on which Clarissa walked, on which she greeted acquaintances and considered gloves in a shop window, there would have been men missing limbs, men with melted faces, making their way among those who’d gone out to shop or to promenade.

In an early draft, Woolf opened the book (then titled “The Hours”) with Peter Walsh walking among the still-intact steeples and statues of central London as a troop of soldiers marched by to lay a memorial wreath in Trafalgar Square. Peter, musing on his own failures and frailties, thought of a woman he’d once loved, named Clarissa.

And, at that moment, a book titled “The Hours” became one called “Mrs. Dalloway.” At that moment a book that had opened with the line “In Westminster, where temples, meeting houses, conventicles, & steeples of all kinds are congregated together, there is at all hours & halfhours, a round of bells, correcting each other, asseverating that time has come a little earlier, or stayed a little later, here or here,” became a book that opened with the line “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

“Mrs. Dalloway” would be a book about a London that had been changed forever, superimposed over a London determined to get back to business as usual, as quickly as possible. Clarissa would stand in for all those who still believed in flowers and parties; Septimus for those who’d been harmed beyond any powers of recovery. The novel would also mark the early period of a literary career that would change forever the ways in which novels are written, and read. It’s an intricately wrought portrait of a place and a moment, and a stunningly acute depiction of the multifarious experience of living a life, anywhere, at any time.

Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including “The Hours,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. This is an excerpt adapted from his introduction to a new edition of “Mrs. Dalloway” that will be published by Vintage in January.

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Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway

What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing, Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention.

Cunningham‘s novel The Hours , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999, pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway. As he reminds readers The Hours was Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway – a better choice, I think, because the novel covers a June day in 1923, the hours of which toll away on Big Ben throughout.

Virginia Woolf wasn’t the first to adopt a free-association literary style and a structure that continually alternates past and present. In 1918, in Ulysses, James Joyce introduced stream-of-consciousness, as he followed his protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephan Daedalus around Dublin for 18 hours on June 16, 1904 – events now celebrated as Bloomsday. Unlike Ulysses , however, Mrs. Dalloway contains characters who don’t interact. She switches from one to another, deepening the theme that we are all unknowable, to others and to ourselves. In the middle of a sentence, for example – typically a long sentence – a reader can conclude that Clarissa Dalloway is prudish, sympathetic, cold, welcoming, insincere, the perfect hostess, handsome, pale insecure, content. The ambiguity is particularly felt when she is doing the observing or remembering, or when her old flame Peter Walsh is. Back in town from India, is he still in love with her? Is he a risk-taking romantic, a failed radical, a sharp critic of society or a sentimental fool? And Clarissa? Does she regret marrying the stolid Richard Dalloway because she couldn’t keep up with Peter’s passion and dreams?

Although the Clarissa-Peter relationship dominates Mrs. Dalloway Woolf does something eccentric, extraordinary, by introducing a parallel narrative, the story of young Septimus Warren-Smith, a shell-shocked war hero whose increasing hallucinations resonate for our own world of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clarissa and Septimus never meet, but they are both haunted by memories – hers, mistakes; his horrors.

It’s ironic that at the rare times Woolf’s sentences are short they are particularly moving: “As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

Cunningham calls Woolf’s “dark and disquieting” novel “profound in scope and depth. Swooningly gorgeous he says of Woolf’s prose, Mrs. Dalloway has obviously inspired his own. Full of telling analogies and elegant sentence rhythms, Cunningham’s introduction, like Woolf’s novel, implies the importance of recognizing the parallel lives lived silently, invisibly, alongside our own. A thoughtful and humane consideration for our own fraught and chaotic time.

Joan Baum is a book reviewer from Springs, New York, and host of the podcast Baum on Books. 

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Virginia Woolf’s novels once left me cold. A new book about ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ changed my mind.

Nearly all readers keep a mental bucket list of books that seemingly everyone in the world loves, but that they themselves — secretly hanging heads in shame — have never quite gotten round to. I, for instance, am exceptionally, perhaps egregiously, fond of both canonical and genre classics, but until last week, I’d never even opened “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s 1925 masterpiece.

In fact, I’d never read any of Woolf’s fiction whatsoever. From various surveys of 20th-century literature, I knew that Woolf’s books, notably “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse” and “The Waves,” were lyrically written and intensely concerned with the delineation of character. The general facts of her life I also knew from having enjoyed works by and about her gossipy Bloomsbury friends Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy and David Garnett, among others. Yet even though I occasionally dipped into her many essay collections, the fiction remained terra incognita. I once tried “Orlando” and gave up after a dozen pages. It just didn’t catch fire for me.

But a few days ago, I picked up an old Modern Library edition of “Mrs. Dalloway” and, as I should have known, discovered a marvel. As they say, better to have arrived late for the party — that’s an in-joke for those familiar with the novel — than never to have gone at all. I’d finally broken the ice because I wanted to review Merve Emre’s just-published “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway,” and it seemed sensible to first approach Woolf’s book straight on rather than as a beflowered monument.

Like similar volumes, “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway” provides a scholarly and biographical introduction, lots of illustrations and extensive marginal notes that explain obscurities, identify people and places, and provide interpretive comment. Emre, however, isn’t critically neutral; she draws mainly on the work of her teachers and contemporaries, while pretty much ignoring older Woolf scholarship. More surprisingly, there’s no appendix reprinting the seed story, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” or the introduction Woolf contributed to my 1928 Modern Library hardcover. Emre prefers a relatively lean but elegant annotated edition, resolutely focused on explicating the work’s meaning and mysteries.

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“ ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ ” she begins, “traces a single summer day in the lives of two people whose paths never cross: Clarissa Dalloway, just over fifty, elegant, charming, and self-possessed, the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament; and Septimus Warren Smith, a solitary ex-soldier, a prophetic man haunted by visions he cannot explain to his anguished wife Lucrezia.” Emre then quickly sketches the minimal plot, which climaxes with the chic dinner party at which Mrs. Dalloway learns of Smith’s suicide.

Throughout, the novel satirizes the English upper classes as shallow and superannuated, vividly evokes the post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the bloodbath that was World War I, reminisces about an Edenic past of rose gardens and golden afternoons, and probes, from multiple points of view, the enigmatic essence of Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf organizes the action around certain symbolic objects and events — an expensive automobile backfiring, a skywriting airplane, the crowded shopping streets of fashionable London, the Dalloway party — and effortlessly segues from one character’s consciousness to another in a series of subtly interconnected interior monologues. As befits an Oxford professor, Emre’s commentary on all this is both learned and lucidly expressed. She neatly points out, for example, the parallels between an author structuring a book and a hostess planning a successful party.

Still, Woolf’s characters remain problematic and endlessly tantalizing. Emre sees Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus as soul mates, celebrating and embracing life, albeit in differing ways: “He kills himself,” she stresses, “not because life is unbearable, but because it is good and he does not want it to be otherwise.” Yet how are we to judge Clarissa’s former suitor Peter Walsh, her devil-may-care friend Sally Seton, and all the others from her present and past, many of whom reassemble at her party? Woolf, in Emre’s view, wants us to regard most of them as failed human beings, egotists and supporters of a social order based on lies and facade.

No doubt she’s right. And yet I find this judgment harsh, for I can’t help but admire their stoicism and the orderly world they served and believed in. Richard Dalloway may be a bit stiff, but he deeply loves and provides for his wife and their adolescent daughter. Peter Walsh is sentimental, highly susceptible to feminine charm and worried about growing old, yet these are all quite human foibles. Even Dr. Bradshaw, whom everyone dislikes, quite accurately diagnoses Septimus’s mental state and acts quickly — if not quickly enough — to have him taken into professional care. Though Woolf’s rapturous prose arias brilliantly capture that ex-soldier’s hallucinations and hypersensitivity to the natural world, his suicide, despite being poeticized by Mrs. Dalloway, deserves pity rather than approbation, especially given the heartbreak he causes his caring, loving wife.

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For me, the real triumph of “Mrs. Dalloway” lies in Woolf’s prose, in its syntactic twists and turns and those rhythmic fragments orchestrated with semicolons, in the dry put-downs — “Hugh Whitbread . . . possessed — no one could doubt it — the art of writing letters to the Times”— and in the kaleidoscopic shifts from the thoughts of one person to another. Sometimes the novel even sounds as wistful as T.S. Eliot’s “Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: From deep in the mind, alluring visions “rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.”

But enough. You may quibble with Emre’s “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway,” as I have, but it’s an invaluable adjunct to Woolf’s haunting masterpiece.

Michael Dirda  reviews books for Style every Thursday.

THE ANNOTATED MRS. DALLOWAY

Edited by Merve Emre

Liveright. 320 pp. $35

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'Mrs. Dalloway' Review

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Mrs. Dalloway is a complex and compelling modernist novel by  Virginia Woolf . It is a wonderful study of its principal characters. The novel enters into the consciousness of the people it takes as it subjects, creating a powerful, psychologically authentic effect. Although quite rightly numbered amongst the most famed modernist writers — such as Proust, ​​Joyce, and ​Lawrence — Woolf is often considered to be a much gentler artist, lacking the darkness of the male contingent of the movement. With Mrs. Dalloway , though, Woolf created a visceral and unyielding vision of madness and a haunting descent into its depths.

Mrs. Dalloway follows a set of characters as they go about their lives on a normal day. The eponymous character, Clarissa Dalloway, does simple things: she buys some flowers, walks in a park, is visited by an old friend and throws a party. She speaks to a man who was once in love with her, and who still believes that she settled by marrying her politician husband. She talks to a female friend with whom she was once in love. Then, in the final pages of the book, she hears about a poor lost soul who threw himself from a doctor's window onto a line of railings.

This man is the second character central in Mrs. Dalloway . His name is Septimus Smith. Shell-shocked after his experiences in ​ World War I , he is a so-called madman who hears voices. He was once in love with a fellow soldier named Evans--a ghost who haunts him throughout the novel. His infirmity is rooted in his fear and his repression of this forbidden love. Finally, tired of a world that he believes is false and unreal, he commits suicide.

The two characters whose experiences form the core of the novel — Clarissa and Septimus — share a number of similarities. In fact, Woolf saw Clarissa and Septimus as more like two different aspects of the same person, and the linkage between the two is emphasized by a series of stylistic repetitions and mirrorings. Unbeknownst to Clarissa and Septimus, their paths cross a number of times throughout the day — just as some of the situations in their lives followed similar paths. Clarissa and Septimus were in love with a person of their own sex, and both repressed their loves because of their social situations. Even as their lives mirror, parallel, and cross — Clarissa and Septimus take different paths in the final moments of the novel. Both are existentially insecure in the worlds they inhabit — one chooses life, while the other commits suicide.

A Note on Style of 'Mrs. Dalloway'

Woolf's style — she is one of the most foremost proponents of what has become known as " stream of consciousness " — allows readers into the minds and hearts of her characters. She also incorporates a level of psychological realism that Victorian novels were never able to achieve. The every day is seen in a new light: internal processes are opened up in her prose, memories compete for attention, thoughts arise unprompted, and the deeply significant and the utterly trivial are treated with equal importance. Woolf's prose is also enormously poetic. She has a very special ability to make the ordinary ebb and flow of the mind sing. Mrs. Dalloway is linguistically inventive, but the novel also has an enormous amount to say about its characters. Woolf handles their situations with dignity and respect. As she studies Septimus and his deterioration into madness, we see a portrait that draws considerably from Woolf's own experiences. Woolf's stream of consciousness-style leads us to experience the madness. We hear the competing voices of sanity and insanity.

Woolf's vision of madness does not dismiss Septimus as a person with a biological defect. She treats the consciousness of the madman as something apart, valuable in itself, and something from which the wonderful tapestry of her novel could be woven.

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In many lives there is a crossroads. We make our choice, and follow it down to the present moment. Still inside of us is that other person, who stands forever poised at the head of the path not chosen. "Mrs. Dalloway" is about a day's communion between the woman who exists, and the other woman who might have existed instead.

The film's heroine muses that she is thought of as "Mrs. Dalloway" by almost everybody: "You're not even Clarissa any more." Once she was young and fair, and tempted by two daring choices. Peter would have been a risk, but he was dangerous, and alive. Even more dangerous was Sally, with whom flirtation threatened to develop into something she was unwilling to name. Clarissa took neither choice, deciding instead to marry the safe and sound Richard Dalloway, of whom young Peter sniffed, "He's a fool, an unimaginative, dull fool." Now many years have passed. Mrs. Dalloway is giving a party. The caterer has been busy since dawn, the day is beautiful, and she walks through Hyde Park to buy the flowers herself. So opened Virginia Woolf's famous 1923 novel, which followed Clarissa Dalloway for a day, using the new stream-of-consciousness technique that James Joyce was experimenting with. We will follow her through until the end of her party, during a day in which no one she meets will know what she's really thinking: All they will see is her reserved, charming exterior.

The novel stays mostly within the mind of Clarissa, with darts into other minds. Film cannot do that, but "Mrs. Dalloway" uses a voice-over narration to let us hear Clarissa's thoughts, which she never, ever shares with anybody else. To the world she is a respectable 60-ish London woman, the wife of a cabinet official. To us, she is a woman who will always wonder what might have been.

Vanessa Redgrave so loved the novel that she commissioned this screenplay by Eileen Atkins , an actress who has been involved in a lot of Woolf-oriented stage work. Redgrave of course seems the opposite of a woman like Clarissa Dalloway, and we assume she has few regrets. But we all wonder about choices not made, because in our memories they still glow with their original promise, while reality is tied to the mundane.

As the film makes its way through Clarissa's day, there are flashbacks to long-ago summers when young Peter ( Alex Cox ) was courting young Clarissa ( Natascha McElhone ), and young Sally ( Lena Headey ) was perhaps courting her, too, although the movie is cagier about that than the novel. But Woolf is too wise to let Peter and Sally remain in the sunny past of memory. They both turn up on this day.

In middle age, Peter ( Michael Kitchen ) is rather pathetic, just returned from what seems to have been an unsuccessful romance and career in India. And Sally ( Sarah Badel ) is now the distinguished Lady Rossiter. There is a wonderful scene where Peter and Sally find a quiet corner of the party, and he tells her of Clarissa, "I loved her once, and it stayed with me all my life, and colored every day." Sally nods, keeping her own thoughts to herself. We gather that Sally, in middle age, may be practicing the same sort of two-track thinking that Clarissa uses: Both women see more sharply, and critically, than anyone imagines, although with Sally, we must guess this from the outside.

There is another crucial character in the film. Unless you've read the novel you may have trouble understanding his function. This is Septimus Warren Smith ( Rupert Graves ), who in an early scene watches as a friend is blown up in the No-Man's Land of the trenches in France. Now five years or more have passed, but he suffers from shell-shock and has a panic attack outside a shop where Clarissa pauses. She sees him, and although they never meet, there is a link between them: Both have seen beneath the surface of life's reassurance, to the possibility that nothing, or worse than nothing, lurks below. Woolf is suggesting that World War I unleashed horrors that poisoned every level of society.

The subtext of the story is suicide. Woolf is asking what purpose is served by the decisions of Clarissa and Septimus to go on living lives that they have seen through. A subtle motif throughout the film is the omnipresence of sharp fence railings--spikes, like life, upon which one could be impaled.

The director, Marleen Gorris , previously made the Oscar-winning Dutch film " Antonia's Line ," about a woman who makes free choices, survives, and prevails. Here is the other side. It's surprising that Gorris, who was so open about Antonia's sexuality, is so subtle about the unspoken lesbianism in Woolf's story, but it's there for those who can see it.

More important is the way she struggles with form, to try to get an almost unfilmable novel on the screen. She isn't always successful; the first act will be perplexing for those unfamiliar with the novel, but Redgrave's performance steers us through, and by the end we understand with complete, final clarity what the story was about. Stream-of-consciousness stays entirely within the mind. Movies photograph only the outsides of things. The narration is a useful device, but so are Redgrave's eyes, as she looks at the guests at her party. Once we have the clue, she doesn't really look at all like a safe, respectable, middle-aged hostess. More like a caged animal--trained, but not tamed.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Mrs. Dalloway (1998)

Rated PG-13 For Emotional Elements and Brief Nudity

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway

Natascha McElhone as Young Clarissa

Rupert Graves as Septimus Smith

Michael Kitchen as Peter Walsh

Alan Cox as Young Peter

Directed by

• Marleen Gorris
• Eileen Atkins

Based On The Novel by

• Virginia Woolf

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‘Fat Ham,’ Coachella and Virginia Woolf as dance: The best SoCal culture for your calendar

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Welcome to another edition of Essential Arts, where the question of the week just might be: How have 99 Cents Only Stores shaped L.A.’s cultural landscape? (Artist Andreas Gursky offers his contribution at the Broad.) But before we dive into the week’s news, let’s roll through our staff recommendations for your culture calendar in the days ahead.

Best bets: What’s on our radar

1. “Fat Ham” “Hamlet” serves as a springboard for spry comedy in James Ijames’ “Fat Ham,” winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Juicy, the young Black queer protagonist, receives an angry visitation from his dead father demanding that he avenge his murder. But a backyard barbecue is underway to celebrate the nuptials of Juicy’s mom and — you guessed it — his uncle. The wildly entertaining Broadway production arrives at Geffen Playhouse with its Shakespearean and Freudian themes deployed to reconsider an age-old question: Can we say no to the tragic fate assigned to us? As hilarious as it is thought-provoking, “Fat Ham” is not to be missed. Through April 28. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. geffenplayhouse.org — Charles McNulty

2. Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Coachella is back, and the 23rd iteration of the festival has arguably the most SoCal-centric bill to date. Friday headliner Lana Del Rey lives here. Saturday headliner Tyler, the Creator grew up here, as did Sunday headliner Doja Cat. Orange County’s No Doubt, the Gwen Stefani-led pop-ska act that last performed together in 2015, is reuniting for the fest, and the Long Beach band Sublime has reformed too. Check out our weekend coverage from The Times’ team on the ground . April 12-14 and 19-21. Empire Polo Club, 81-800 Avenue 51, Indio. www.coachella.com — August Brown

3. “Kairos” Part romantic comedy, part “Black Mirror” episode? Lisa Sanaye Dring’s compelling new play “Kairos” introduces a medical advancement that can guarantee immortality. Sylvia Kwan and Gerard Joseph play thirtysomethings who, upon falling in love, contemplate the potential consequences of embracing eternal life, and how it will affect society at large — not to mention their budding relationship since, well, forever is a very long time. Jesca Prudencio directs the rolling world premiere of the piece, originally developed as part of the Geffen Playhouse Writers’ Room. Through April 28. Union Center for the Arts, David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 N. Judge John Aiso Street, Little Tokyo. eastwestplayers.org — Ashley Lee

4. “Book of Mountains & Seas” Composer Huang Ruo, who was born in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution and immigrated to the U.S. in his youth, wrote the extraordinary string quartet “Dust in Time,” inspired by Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, at the start of the pandemic. Recorded in an empty Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, it served as a kind of otherworldly healing ceremony. The following year Ruo embarked on an opera based on ancient Chinese myth. Created in collaboration with the dazzling puppeteer Basil Twist and the effervescent chorus Ars Nova Copenhagen, “Book of Mountains and Seas” now comes to Santa Monica courtesy of Los Angeles Opera. Wednesday through April 14. The Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica. laopera.org — Mark Swed

5. “Woolf Works” Three Virginia Woolf novels — “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Orlando” and “The Waves” — are inspiration for the Wayne McGregor ballet having its North American premiere next week by American Ballet Theatre in Costa Mesa. The three acts of dance are not literal adaptations of Woolf’s stories but rather a visual evocation of the novels’ emotions and themes. In reviewing the Royal Ballet performance of “Woolf Works” last year, the Guardian used words such as “ravishing,” “astonishing” and, yes, “masterpiece.” Thursday-Sunday. Segerstrom Hall, Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org — Craig Nakano

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The week ahead: A curated calendar

Long Story Short An exhibition featuring artworks dating from the 1940s to the present day, drawn from MOCA’s collection with the intention of reminding viewers that “art history, and history more broadly, is made in the present.” Through April 28. Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. moca.org

Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer One of the lesser-known pioneers of photography, Bayard was a Parisian bureaucrat and inventor who practiced his art on the side; the exhibition presents photographs dating from the 1840s and includes one of the earliest photo albums ever created. Tuesday–July 7. The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Nineteenth-Century Photography Now A new look at the Getty’s collection of 19th century photography and the work of contemporary artists who respond directly to its historical themes and subject matter. Tuesday–July 7. The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Nourishment Sanaa Gateja’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles precedes the artist’s upcoming participation in the Ugandan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Through May 18. Karma, 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, L.A. karmakarma.org

Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision Conceptual artist Charles Gaines’ performance-based installation transforms the original text of the landmark 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case. 8:30 p.m. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya, and Moche Pottery Ancient works from the Mediterranean, Central America and northern Peru explore the ways ceramics served as a dynamic means of storytelling and social engagement. Through July 2. The Getty Villa, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades. getty.edu

Keep t he Party Going: A Tribute t o Jimmy Buffett Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Jon Bon Jovi and more pay homage to the late Mayor of Margaritaville. 7 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. hollywoodbowl.com

The Beast A science-fiction romantic drama written and directed by Bertrand Bonello, starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, and loosely based on Henry James’ 1903 novella “The Beast in the Jungle.” Now playing, AMC Burbank and Landmark Theatres Sunset ; starts Friday, Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica; Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino; Laemmle Glendale; Laemmle Claremont. laemmle.com

Civil War Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny star in writer-director Alex Garland’s thriller about a fractured U.S. in a not-too-distant future. Starts Friday with Thursday previews. a24films.com

Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony Conductor Louis Langrée leads the L.A. Phil in Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, plus a symphonic world premiere by Jonathan Bailey Holland. 8 p.m. Friday; 2 p.m. April 13-14. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

SATURDAY, APRIL 13

Rainbow: The New Judy Garland Musical Michael Feinstein stars in this multimedia trip through the life of the Hollywood icon. 8 p.m. Mark Taper Forum, 35 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. centertheatregroup.org

The biggest L.A. culture news

The Mark Taper Forum will relaunch regular programming in early 2025, but have the underlying problems that forced Center Theatre Group to close its historic stage been solved? That was the question driving the conversation between Times theater critic Charles McNulty and CTG’s leaders, Artistic Director Snehal Desai and Managing Partner Meghan Pressman . The story was the most popular subscriber read this week.

McNulty also has the verdict on Katerina McCrimmon as Fanny Brice: dazzling . You can read his review of “Funny Girl” at the Ahmanson Theatre .

Staff writer Ashley Lee has the back story on “Ride,” a production at the Old Globe in San Diego that recounts the journey of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world. The story unfolds with just two actors, and Lee explores how increasingly regional theater companies across the country, faced with tightened budgets, have looked for productions that entertain audiences with the most minimal of casts .

Times classical music critic Mark Swed explains the phenomenon of Philip Glass ’ 20 etudes, which have become the composer’s most performed music. Swed explains why Yuja Wang , Alice Waters , Justin Peck , Martin Scorsese and Laurie Anderson , among others, have been expressing such fandom for these Glass works.

Taylor Swift and Beyoncé may be selling out stadiums, but the concert and music festival biz isn’t universally golden these days. Made in America , the Labor Day festival founded by Jay-Z in Philadelphia that added a downtown L.A. satellite in 2014, canceled for the second year in a row .

More culture news, briefly ...

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The Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts has announced its 2024-25 season lineup featuring partnerships with L.A. Opera , Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra , Los Angeles Ballet , L.A. Dance Project and Tonality , among others. Theater is part of the plan, including Tectonic Theater Project’s play “Here There Are Blueberries” by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich .

Segerstrom Center for the Arts announced its 2024-25 Broadway programming. The lineup features 10 shows including “Hamilton,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Life of Pi,” “Back to the Future: The Musical” and “Hadestown.”

Palm Springs Art Museum has appointed Christine Vendredi as its new chief curator. Vendredi is the former global director of art for Louis Vuitton and co-author of two books on architecture. She begins in her position this month.

Lang Lang , the classical pianist who’s equally at home playing movie melodies at the Hollywood Bowl as he is performing Bach in recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall, will get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Wednesday.

Pacific Opera Project announced its 2024-25 season lineup , which includes two outdoor productions: the Los Angeles premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s “Rusalka” performed at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” staged at Heritage Square Museum in Montecito Heights.

RIP Christopher Durang, Tony Award-winning writer of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” who died at 75 .

Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä , who turned 28 in January, was appointed music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra , succeeding Riccardo Muti and becoming the CSO’s youngest leader since it was founded in 1891.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least ...

A-plus-plus to the smart kid who figured out that waving a school absence slip by a concert stage is an excellent way to score an autograph from Bruce Springsteen .

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Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

Jessica Gelt is an arts and culture writer for the Los Angeles Times.

August Brown covers pop music, the music industry and nightlife policy at the Los Angeles Times.

Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.

Charles McNulty is the theater critic of the Los Angeles Times. He received his doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

Mark Swed has been the classical music critic of the Los Angeles Times since 1996.

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Rural Hours by Harriet Baker review – the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann

Three writers’ pastoral years are beautifully observed in this group biography but seem little more than tangential to their work

O n Easter Monday 1930, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was walking along a lane in East Chaldon, Dorset, when she arrived at an unappetising-looking cottage, its muddy stucco powerfully redolent – to most people, at least – of damp and disheartenment. She knew already it was for sale, and having borrowed a set of keys from a nearby pub, she went inside for a closer look. For her, if for no one else, its shabby severity was an essential part of its attraction. So what if it had no electricity or running water? If the surveyor would later describe it as undesirable? Such cons were her get-out clause; her exoneration from naughty “bourgeois cravings”. Unlike other down-from-London types, she wouldn’t pinch the best house from the locals. She would jump on the very worst house, and hope not to crash through any rotten floorboards as she did. Reader, she bought it, warts and all.

A lot of what Warner and her trouser-wearing tenant (later her lover), Valentine Ackland, got up to at Miss Green (the house was named after its last elderly owner) thereafter is perfectly admirable in its way: more thrift shop than Vinterior and Farrow & Ball, even if I don’t like the sound of the words “not a single upholstered chair”. But still, there’s something funny and Marie Antoinette-ish at play here, too. Warner’s aversion to middle-class luxury was so extreme, she threw a strop when a friend installed a bathroom at his country house. At Miss Green, she and Ackland bathed once a week in their kitchen, in a copper filled with rainwater – a bit of kit she had been taught to use by Mrs Keates, her London char. Later, she would write about this copper, and how it required the bather to adopt a posture reminiscent of “ancient British pit burials”. One gathers that she did not regard this as at all a bad thing.

Such details are the principal joy of Harriet Baker’s new book about three writers – the other two are Virginia Woolf and Rosamond Lehmann – and their country lives, even if she is a bit too anxiously reverential ever to laugh herself; as beetroots need a little vinegar, this book is in want of the occasional drop of acid. Yes, it’s exasperating, at moments, to read of people with servants and private annuities proudly “reclaiming drudge work”, however high-minded their reasons (Baker’s conviction is that this is all part of a necessary perspective shift, the rhythms of their labour reflected in their work via “new experiments in form, and in feeling”). A life that is chosen is very different to one trammelled by money and the need to earn it, even if both existences do involve relieving broad beans of their jackets. Of these three writers, moreover, only Lehmann had children, and they were away at boarding school. But still, it is entrancing to read of a huge fungus being sliced “like cheese” (Woolf); of the roast pheasant that marks a solitary birthday (Lehmann, though the bird was cooked by the help, Mrs Wickens); of the “gentle” acquirement of meat-safes (Warner, again). It makes you see your own stuff with new eyes, old familiar things suddenly full of meaning.

I do wonder, though, about the book’s thesis. Rural Hours is undeniably beautifully written, and Baker’s reading is wide and deep; you cannot fault her research, even if much of the material is familiar. In itself, the fact that its attention is focused on relatively brief and less well-known (“storied”) periods in its subjects’ lives isn’t a bad thing, and should be a virtue: Woolf in Asheham, Sussex, where she and her husband, Leonard, lived (1912-1919) before they moved to Monk’s House at Rodmell; Warner in Dorset in the 1930s (poor Miss Green would be destroyed by a German bomb in 1944); Lehmann in a Berkshire village where she pines hopelessly for her appallingly selfish married lover, Cecil Day-Lewis, as the second world war rages on. But the trouble is that the centre does not hold. Not only does the countryside play a very different role in each woman’s life; sometimes, it’s tangential, hardly more than a backdrop. They’re all constantly up and down to London; Lehmann, a city person in her bones, will soon move there full-time.

What influence does it have on their work? I would say: only as much as many other things in their lives – and sometimes a great deal less. Baker makes a great case for Woolf’s “forgotten” Asheham notebook, the proto-diary she began in 1917; for her, its repetitions conceal a “quiet experimentalism”. But the fact is that Mrs Dalloway (a novel set in London) and To the Lighthouse will be written elsewhere, and it’s rather effortful to connect the diary’s reckoning of foraged mushrooms and gathered blackberries with either of them. The novels for which Lehmann is best known were already written by the time she set up shop in Diamond Cottage; the book she published while living there, The Ballad and the Source , was her greatest failure. As for Warner, she arrived in Dorset with her witch, Lolly Willowes , already a hit; she wouldn’t have another such triumph until The Corner That Held Them (1948), which even Baker admits is really a war novel. This isn’t, of course, to say that the quotidian, the domestic and the pastoral aren’t interesting or worthy of thought; only that they’re pressed here into the service of an extended argument that feels, rather like one of Warner’s creaking Regency chairs, just a touch wobbly and contingent.

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