Why Woolf?

On Mark Hussey’s ‘Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel’

Claude Monet, Leicester Square at Night, 1900-1901, Oil on canvas

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions. One notably ardent participant is Mark Hussey, a scholar of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, who marked the anniversary by publishing a “biography” of Mrs Dalloway. His book traces the novel’s antecedents, its birth and welfare during Woolf’s lifetime, its shifting fortunes after her death in 1941 at age 59, and its prodigious cultural offspring — much as if he were writing about the life of a person in the world.

Hussey’s is not the first book of its kind, and it won’t be the last. In fact, his is the inaugural volume of Manchester University Press’ planned series of biographies of beloved novels, and it is a paragon of the form: efficiently written, yet chock-full of virtues large and small. It reminds me of Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2020 book Three Rings, a small but mighty volume that mapped the life and afterlife of Homer’s Odyssey, exploring how that ancient tale has served through the centuries as a randy literary progenitor, endlessly spawning other books. Like Mendelsohn’s, Hussey’s study is a love letter to its subject in all the right ways: accessible and jargon-free, fond but not fawning, curatorial but never pedantic, honest yet unfailingly tactful.

Virginia Woolf recycled the figure of Clarissa Dalloway, a lesser character in her first novel who became a full-blown protagonist in her fourth. That first novel was called The Voyage Out and is a much more traditional book, decorously issued in 1915 by the publishing company owned by Woolf’s stepbrother Gerald Duckworth. It features a marriage plot that veers from others of its kind by killing off its young heroine at the end. In the decade after Woolf wrote The Voyage Out, she lived through the Great War and suffered a prolonged period of mental illness, emerging from both determined to forge a new way of writing fiction. Having witnessed the mammoth devastations of a pointless war and the personal fragmentation brought on by what she called her “madness,” she was convinced that preconceptions about character in novels of previous eras were no longer applicable in her own. She set out to represent human character as she saw it, with each person made up of “scraps, orts and fragments,” as she later put it in a riff on Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” and human society as an assortment of distinct but intertwined consciousnesses that argue and harmonize with one another both above and below the surface of daily life.

From this conviction sprang Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, a book that taught her, as she wrote in her diary, “how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.” The book sold an honorable 1,413 copies, but the real story is how it sold. It was the first novel published by Hogarth Press, which was co-owned and operated by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. From then on, Woolf would be published by her own press, appearing on its list of literary heavyweights along with T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, and scores of others. Controlling her means of production gave Woolf an exhilarating freedom as an author: no pushback from editors, no decisions about design or sales or anything else made by anyone other than herself and her husband. Creatively and practically, she was endowed with a pure self-determination of the kind few writers ever experience. After Jacob’s Room, Woolf launched into a period of immense productivity, finishing six works of fiction and at least five works of nonfiction over the course of 16 years. Much more would appear after her death, including voluminous letters and diaries, multiple collections of short fiction, and the autobiographical pieces posthumously collected into the 1972 book Moments of Being.

In 1923, Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted the novel following Jacob’s Room “to give life & death, sanity & insanity: I want to describe the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.” This was the book that would become Mrs Dalloway, and her aspirations for it were typical of her ambition. Woolf would give “life & death, sanity & insanity” through the book’s two most prominent characters. Whereas Clarissa Dalloway spends that sunny June day preparing to host a party that will on the surface at least appear recognizably sane, displaying all of life’s comedy and drama and preening and eros, on that same day Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, is afflicted with hallucinations, haunted by and attracted to the oblivion promised by death.

As legions of readers including Woolf’s good friend Lytton Strachey have pointed out, not much happens in Mrs Dalloway aside from the shifting interior thoughts and feelings of these protagonists and the other characters, connecting them in various ways and producing the impression of an integrated collective unconscious that reflects Woolf’s ecstatic vision of human connection. With so little plot and no easy way into the story, what is it about Mrs Dalloway that has provoked emphatic emotions in readers for an entire century? (The novel was successful from the outset, with Hogarth Press selling 3,000 copies in four years and sales exploding with the arrival of various editions and translations; in 1926, Woolf noted proudly that the book was paying for the construction of water closets in her Sussex country house.) Why the perpetual fondness for this novel in particular, and why for Woolf in general, an internationally revered writer for whom there are now dedicated at least 15 full-length biographies and many more biography-adjacent studies? Why not the same enduring popularity for, say, Woolf’s contemporaries Dorothy Richardson, who also wrote dazzlingly innovative fiction in a modernist “stream of consciousness” style, or Katherine Mansfield, the only other author of Woolf’s acquaintance with whom she felt true rivalry? What is it about Woolf that — love her or hate her — compels so many people around the world to feel more proprietary, more personally engaged, than just about any other English-language writer of the last hundred years? “We all seem to feel that we have our Virginia Woolf,” American novelist Michael Cunningham remarked before the 1998 publication of his own Woolf-inflected novel, The Hours.

These are huge questions. They go beyond the facts of Woolf’s literary contribution and deep into the nature of celebrity, what we expect and need from it. They’re entangled, of course, with the glamor of Woolf’s personal history: the exclusive allure of her Bloomsbury circle, the London homes and the Sussex country retreat, her madness and her suicide. We ask these questions out of prurience and envy, wishfulness and fear. They speak much more about us than they do about her. Wisely, Mark Hussey’s book doesn’t worry too hard over them, preferring the clarity of facts to the murk of speculation. But many of those facts are pertinent to the continuing life span of Mrs Dalloway and are thus worth mulling, even a little.

In September 1926, Virginia Woolf heard from her friend Philip Morrell when he finished reading Mrs Dalloway. (Morrell was a former Conservative politician and the husband of Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose literary soirées the Woolfs had been attending for years.) To Woolf’s surprise, Morrell accused her with some resentment of modeling two of the book’s “dullest characters” after him: Clarissa Dalloway’s husband Richard and her old friend Hugh Whitbread, a pompous and rather too impeccable English gentleman. This was news to Woolf, who told Morrell that in fact she had wanted readers to like Richard Dalloway and to hate Hugh Whitbread. “You hate them both I gather,” she added.

About this, Hussey comments neutrally, “No writer can really control how readers react to their inventions.” But he also points out that Woolf thought and wrote a lot about the origins of her characters and how they ought to be interpreted. In an introduction to the 1928 Modern Library edition of Mrs Dalloway, she insisted that once a novel is published, “it ceases to be the property of the author,” belonging entirely to readers. She titled several of her essay collections The Common Reader, and by this she meant that she saw the world of readership as an international society, entirely unprofessional and nonacademic but serious nonetheless, whose members shared the simple cooperative goal of reading and talking about books. In an essay from one of her Common Reader volumes, called “How Should One Read a Book?,” she urged her fellow readers “to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” Thus Woolf would have had to admit, and probably did, that Philip Morrell was entirely within his rights to see himself as the model for both Mr. Dalloway and Mr. Whitbread, even though this was absolutely not her intention.

Hussey offers a related anecdote later in his book, this time about Michael Cunningham, the author of The Hours, a novelistic homage to Woolf and Mrs Dalloway that Cunningham called “a book about reading a book.” A publishing blockbuster in 1998, The Hours has become something of a procreative machine, generating successful film and opera adaptations while also inspiring other Dalloway-smitten novels. (If Cunningham’s book is a “child” of Mrs Dalloway, Hussey calls novels inspired by The Hours “grandchildren,” including among their number Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies of 2015 and Anna Solomon’s The Book of V. of 2020.) In turn, The Hours fostered a rekindled enthusiasm for Mrs Dalloway, which was reissued by Harcourt in a new paperback edition and displayed in bookstores side by side with Cunningham’s novel.

Hussey recaps the story Cunningham has told and retold of the evolution of his love for Mrs Dalloway. It began in an unpropitious way in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when Cunningham was in high school in Southern California, hoping to impress a cool literary girl. When she asked how he felt about T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Cunningham remembers: “Now, I wasn’t completely illiterate — I had heard of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and I knew Virginia Woolf was very tall and insane and lived in a lighthouse and jumped in the ocean, but I never expected I’d have to read either one of them.” From this glorious summit of ignorance Cunningham eventually descended, as we know, to become a mere authority on Woolf, first by actually reading Mrs Dalloway and then by researching and writing and publicizing The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002. After the film’s release, American sales of Mrs Dalloway exploded, with 56,000 copies sold in January 2003 alone. In 2022, Picador published a combined edition of Mrs Dalloway and The Hours, with a new introduction by Cunningham. His was an ambitious and imaginative gamble that succeeded handsomely, springing from a single besotted impulse to write, as he said in an interview, “about how a book could matter to someone as much as a love affair.”

As much as a love affair. What a direct strike to the heart of why we become attached to novels, and especially to Mrs Dalloway. In love affairs, we can and do adore people without understanding them, and we often perceive their lives to be but dim mirrors of our own. And so it is with a novel like Mrs Dalloway. We might miss fathoms worth of what Woolf originally intended her book to be. We might be as blinkered as Philip Morrell when we search her characters for phantom aspects of ourselves. Even the two people closest to Woolf, her sister and her husband, sometimes confessed to only partial understanding of her novels, though they believed wholly in their greatness. The same is true for us common readers. Every one of us Woolf fanatics — experts and amateurs, intimates and newcomers — is wrong about her, wrong every day, all wrong. Still her books belong to us, as she insisted they must, and we cling to whatever meaning we think we can discern in the consolations of her art.

Like love affairs, Woolf’s novels can stir up passions aside from adoration. Hussey is entertaining about the vitriol from Woolf haters over the decades, from Q. D. Leavis in 1932 to Philip Hensher, who in 2003 called her fiction “inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent.” Continuing declarations of both loathing and love are clear signs that Mrs Dalloway is still thumpingly alive, though the novel speaks differently depending on circumstances and changing psychological needs. A recent trend looks to Woolf’s books as a kind of wellness retreat. During the pandemic, Evan Kindley wrote a much-discussed piece for the New Yorker called “Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’” In memoir, there’s a tendency to hitch Woolf to the loaded cart of a young writer’s personal suffering, as in Katharine Smyth’s 2019 All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, which invokes Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse to help Smyth navigate her grief for a dead parent.

Woolf once wrote in her diary about her own late father, the eminent Victorian biographer and critic Leslie Stephen, that his writing was “very witty & bright, without a single dead sentence in it.” Stephen himself, in a 1902 essay on John Ruskin, had counseled that “a sentence should be alive to its fingers’ ends.” If Virginia Woolf had anything close to a single literary credo, it was that. If there is any simplified explanation for why we still read Mrs Dalloway, it is that. Look at any paragraph of Woolf’s, in her criticism as well as in her fiction, to find it alive to its fingers’ ends — to find her, and by extension us (as she wrote in an essay on Montaigne), “simmer[ing] over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle.” There’s a vastness in Woolf, an inexhaustibility and an eagerness, that in turn sparks procreativity in others, that seduces readers into feeling the endless possibilities that she detected within the human soul. I think this is the reason for Woolf’s endurance: every time you turn to her writing, the cauldron is still simmering. No matter how wrong we can be about her motivations and her popularity — no matter how reduced her image has become to a fetish on a tote bag, an argument over Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose in the film adaptation of The Hours, or a meme about buying the flowers yourself or finding a room of one’s own — we continue to find what we need in her books, which in their infinite variety still seem completely new.

Donna Rifkind is a book critic and the author of The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood.