On a broiling day in mid-July in London, I am studying the tables in my favorite bookstore, Hatchards, on Piccadilly Road, adjacent to Fortnum & Mason and opposite the Royal Academy of Arts. The store, which was founded in 1797, has been at this location since 1801 and claims to be the oldest bookstore in London. Oscar Wilde used to sign his books at the table on the ground floor.
Piccadilly Circus, with its boutiques, roaring buses, and throngs of people, is, admittedly, a slightly unexpected place for a five-story bookstore with an eye-catching moss-green exterior, bow windows, a gracious wooden staircase and carpeted floors. But perhaps the hustle-bustle around it is what makes Hatchards seem like a respite from the marketplace, a haven in a hurried world. Although it’s technically owned by the chain bookseller Waterstones, a courteous old-world atmosphere reigns.
The salespeople are shockingly knowledgeable for someone used to frequenting Barnes & Noble, and more than willing to scour the store for an unfamiliar title. The books (100,000 in all), lined up on black bookshelves or stacked on tables and organized by category and even micro-category, seem vital rather than dusty leftovers from a pre-A.I. age, and I suddenly find myself puffing with pride at the thought of being a writer.
I have never entered Hatchards without remembering that this is the bookstore Clarissa Dalloway pauses before in Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Mrs. Dalloway: “But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover?” Fittingly, Hatchards has chosen to celebrate the centenary of this high-modernist classic by re-publishing it under its own green-and-gold-jacketed imprint in a limited edition of 2,000. I purchase No. 1,935, for around $23.
What, one might ask, is the abiding appeal of Mrs. Dalloway, such that it continues to be treated as though it were a fresh discovery—analyzed (The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway, by Edward Mendelson, and Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel, by Mark Hussey), annotated (The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Merve Emre), and re-published in scholarly editions that hew more closely to the original text? Most strikingly, perhaps, it is a novel that, like James Joyce’s Ulysses (which Woolf both admired and resisted, impugning the author’s “damned egotistical self” and declaring his book to be a “misfire”), takes place in its complex entirety on a single day in June, beginning in medias res with the throwaway yet oddly pregnant sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
From this precise observation it expands, thanks to Woolf’s capacious mind and fluid stream-of-consciousness prose, to take on everything from self-important Harley Street physicians to an old woman singing in the street for whatever coins might be thrown her way, from the yellow curtains printed with birds of paradise in Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing room to the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran suffering from what was once called “shell shock” and is now referred to as PTSD. Despite its strict boundaries, the novel has an epic feel, looking thousands of years backward to “the age of tusk and mammoth” and telescoping forward to a time when “all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.”
Woolf was born into the Edwardian literary aristocracy. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, an eminent historian of ideas and the founder of England’s Dictionary of National Biography, who counted Thomas Hardy and Henry James among his close friends; he was also a demanding, importuning husband. Her mother, Julia Stephen, a pre-Raphaelite beauty, philanthropist, and tireless do-gooder, died of influenza at 49 when Woolf, one of four siblings, was 13.
Woolf would later call her mother’s death “the greatest disaster that could happen.” It contributed to the fragility of her mental health and precipitated what Woolf described as her first breakdown. Julia became the model for the yearned-for Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, just as the irascible Mr. Ramsay was based on her father, Leslie. Although she and her older sister Vanessa did not complete university, as their brothers Thoby and Adrian did, Woolf was a voracious, catholic reader and had the run of her father’s library.
In their early 20s, the Woolf sisters were part of the Bloomsbury Group, a much-documented circle of writers, intellectuals, and artists that included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Woolf’s future husband, the “penniless Jew” (as she described him in a letter to a friend announcing their engagement in 1912 ) Leonard Woolf.
Woolf was 40 when she began writing Mrs. Dalloway; with three novels and a collection of short stories under her belt, as well as growing renown as a critic and essayist, she was becoming more confident in her powers as a writer. She conceived of this novel, which began as two short stories, more thoroughly than she had the earlier ones, confiding in her diary her fears—that, for instance, the middle-aged Clarissa was a “stiff-glittering & tinsely” figure—as well as her thoughts about a method of creating characters that occurred to her while writing the new book. “I 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.”
When Mrs. Dalloway first appeared from the Hogarth Press, an imprint which the Woolfs had founded together in 1917, it was largely met with acclaim. But the novel also had its detractors, such as Wyndham Lewis, who thought it a “puerile” imitation of Joyce’s “realistic vigor.” Other critics found it boring, or too experimental. One particularly hostile reviewer denounced Septimus Warren Smith, the young veteran to whom Woolf had given much of her own experience of madness, as a “wretched neurotic … a huge piece of irrelevance.”
Woolf, who was notoriously hard on her own work, deemed it a “feat” and thought it her best book to date. And, indeed, while Woolf’s style can be overly ephemeral—what, exactly, is she trying to say?—and her sensibility too hypertrophied for some readers, there is no denying the breadth of her vision, panning over the city she described in her diary as “a jewel of jewels” without missing London’s grimy underside and placid indifference to the weak.
On the surface, the novel is about little more than the preparations for Clarissa’s party as she walks along London’s High Street, recalling her childhood home at Bourton, where she wore pink gauze and shifted her marital sights from the love-struck, needy Peter Walsh, with whom “everything had to be shared; everything gone into,” to the more stalwart (and less interesting) Richard Dalloway. At the same time, there is a piercing subterranean assessment of patriarchal power, class disparities, “the sane and the insane side by side” (as Woolf describes the contrapuntal dynamic between Clarissa and Septimus), and the lingering horrors of World War I.
Woolf’s original plan, as set down in her notebooks, was to have Clarissa Dalloway commit suicide, until she happened on the Dostoyevsky-like idea of a double, who is afflicted with the despair that Mrs. Dalloway feels only intermittently. Although Clarissa is an upper-crust woman with no small amount of Woolf’s own snobbery—she sneeringly thinks of her daughter’s impecunious tutor, Miss Kilman, as perpetually aggrieved and perspiring in an old green raincoat—she is also an outsider.
When, wearing her “silver-green mermaid’s dress,” she hears, at the end of her party, whose guests include the prime minister himself, that Septimus has committed suicide, she feels almost physically bloodied by the news: “He had thrown himself from a window. 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.” Two pages later, her identification becomes even more acute: “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
It seems fitting somehow that Mrs. Dalloway, with its rush of impressions and darting interior voice, its focus on the way the unseen presence of death shadows even the brightest of mornings, should be heralded again at this moment. Clarissa’s “passion for gloves” is just as real as her intuition of loneliness and fear, and all of it combines to induce in us, Woolf’s readers, an apprehension of the perils that lurk beyond our daily ambit: “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.”
Woolf ended her own life on March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, far out to sea and alone, having drowned herself in the River Ouse after placing heavy pebbles in her overcoat pockets; in her suicide note to Leonard, she expressed fears of a recurring mental breakdown.
I think of her often these days, looking to her evocative and supremely lucid prose for a toehold on the fragmenting world we find ourselves in, wondering what she would have made of it. In my mind’s eye, I see her walking up Piccadilly and stopping at Hatchards to sift through the latest novels, histories, biographies, and treatises on Fascism and autocracy, casting her quick, discriminating eye on what is past, passing, and to come.
Daphne Merkin is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of numerous books, including the memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression and the novels Enchantment and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love. She is currently working on a book about her experiences in psychoanalysis
