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

(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.”
    â€œI 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: