Free Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf Page A

party. Clarissa had feared that her daughter would not attend, but Elizabeth has extricated herself from Miss Kilman (who never would have come, even if invited). In a social situation where she is the object of scrutiny and floral metaphor, Elizabeth stages a quiet rebellion. She leaves us to wonder about the future of a young woman who a few hours earlier had exulted in riding on the top of a bus through lively areas of the Strand, where her family rarely ventured.
    While we might expect Clarissa to be completed by the reassembly of her beloved trio, formed with Sally and Peter at the
party, she postpones their reunion beyond the end of the novel. Her absence lets us sample the kind of conversational intimacy that Woolf liked at parties, as we find Sally and Peter reconstructing Bourton days once again, while they wait for her. This pair could not care less about the society assembled before them. But neither of them is very remarkable as an adult. Our sense of Peter’s failures has grown through the day. Sally may not have gone under like Mrs. Bradshaw, but she has lost every radical bone in her body. The party has a ghostly visitor in the form of Septimus Smith, and having heard of his death from the Bradshaws, Clarissa draws apart to accommodate him. She finds an affirmation of life from his throwing it away, her thoughts echoing his own feelings of the event. Even the earliest interpreters of
Mrs. Dalloway
were fascinated by the old woman Clarissa watches in the window opposite, another liminal visitor to the party, another affirmation of life going on in the simple act of going alone to bed. Thus the end of
Mrs. Dalloway
takes life into another register, remote, spiritual, and respectful of the difficulty of surviving even a single day. Survival has its fragmented pleasures, like Mrs. Dalloway’s plunging into a perfect London morning in June, or Rezia and Septimus assembling an absurd little hat together, or Peter experiencing ecstasy and terror as the woman he once loved so desperately stands before him as we leave the party.
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    For their painstaking reading of drafts of this introduction, and their useful suggestions, I should like to thank Mark Hussey, Suzette Henke, Susan Gubar, and Heidi Cathryn Molly Scott.
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    WORKS CITED
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    Abel, Elizabeth. “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of
Mrs. Dalloway
” In
The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development
, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, 161–85. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983.
    Beja, Morris. Introduction to
Mrs. Dalloway
, by Virginia Woolf, xi–xxxi. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1996.
    Bradshaw, David. “Explanatory Notes.” In
Mrs. Dalloway
, by Virginia Woolf, 166–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
    Caramagno, Thomas.
The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
    Lewis, Wyndham.
Men Without Art
. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987. Originally published in 1934.
    Richter, Harvena. “The
Ulysses
Connection: Clarissa Dalloway’s Bloomsday.”
Studies in the Novel
21.3 (Fall 1989): 305–19.
    Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
. Produced by Lisa Katselas Paré and Stephen Bayly. Directed by Marleen Gorris. Screenplay by Eileen Atkins. First Look Pictures, 1999.
    Woolf, Virginia.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two: 1920–1924
. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, with Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
    â€”—.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3: 1919–1924
. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
    â€”—. “An Introduction to
Mrs. Dalloway
.” In
The Mrs. Dalloway Reader
. Edited by Francine Prose, 10–12. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Originally published in 1928.
    â€”—.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume Three: 1923–1928
.