Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf Read Free Book Online

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
:
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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)
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    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.
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    Work in Progress
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    A T 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 completed 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”