In the footsteps of Mrs Dalloway: taking to the street to celebrate Virginia Woolf

Illustration by Zoë Barker

Set on a single summer day, 13 June 1923, this talismanic book follows one woman around the smarter streets of the city as she buys gloves and chooses flowers for the dinner party she is to give. (Her route is shadowed in the novel by the walks of her former suitor, Peter Walsh, and her suicidal double, Septimus Smith.) For the centenary of the book’s publication, a growing body of devotees are calling for the proper institution of Dallowayday in the literary calendar. This would grant the novel equal stature to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work honoured every summer in Dublin three days later, on Bloomsday, when fans walk in the steps of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

“A day for Mrs Dalloway would be a great thing,” urges the London Literary Salon’s Californian founder, Toby Brothers. “It would be a wonderful chance to celebrate the exquisite proposal that Woolf makes in this book: that the interior realm can be heroic. We could have a party too, as the book is about holding a party.” Brothers suspects Woolf would have relished the implicit challenge to the status of Ulysses, written seven years before her own novel came out. “Joyce has created perhaps a more expansive, explosive world, while Woolf’s is introspective. But her writing really does acknowledge the integrity of the individual psyche and the privacy of the self in an extraordinary way.”

Woolf’s radical narrative, so the argument goes, can match Joyce’s epic, stride for stride, admittedly over a shorter distance. True, Bloom’s fictional tour of the Irish capital bristles with energy and bravado. But somehow, in spite of the fact Clarissa Dalloway is a dutiful 51-year-old wife to a Conservative MP who simply enjoys the breeze in Regent’s Park after visiting the shops, the themes of her day are darker and more permanently unsettling. The line most often quoted to describe the strain of jeopardy that runs through the novel is now almost scripture for Woolf’s keenest readers. Mrs Dalloway, we learn, “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”.

The novel, which was followed over the next three decades by Woolf’s major works, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves, paints a pleasing portrait of London, but it is also a sharp provocation. It insistently asks whether the fleeting joys of life can make it all worthwhile. We know Woolf’s ultimate answer to this question. On 28 March 1941 she left her home and walked into the River Ouse, her pockets laden with stones. But in Mrs Dalloway, written 16 years earlier, she alludes to an alternative, more positive response, never denying the reality of human misery.

Helen Tennison, who is directing an immersive theatrical walk based on the novel, starting at the London Library, where Woolf was a lifetime member, backs the calls for an official Dallowayday. “It may seem to be a day in the life of a privileged woman,” she says, “but it’s really about her interior world. And this interiority is the genius of the novel. You go with Clarissa from the cusp of absolute despair to joy within seconds.” The Royal Society of Literature, a collaborator on Tennison’s production, has already commemorated the day for some time, she points out, but greater recognition is due.

The first to really bang the drum for the cause was the venerable US literary critic Elaine Showalter. A decade ago she complained publicly that Leopold Bloom was regarded as more important than Clarissa Dalloway. She feels the same way now, saying: “London deserves to celebrate its writers, just as Dublin celebrates James Joyce’s great novel. Every London florist should create a bouquet in honour of the day when a great literary hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, decides to buy the flowers for her big summer party herself.”

Aside from the two June days they each inhabit, Joyce and Woolf’s groundbreaking novels often share the fate of being thought too difficult to bother with. Actually, they can both communicate on an elemental and intoxicating level, at least when taken in big gulps. But Mrs Dalloway also suffers from being regularly encountered as a set academic text; its themes pulled out one by one to moor it in the literary canon. Happily for me, I underwent no such classroom analysis of the novel and came across the thrill of it a little later, experiencing its flowing sentences as a kind of whisper in the ear that made me linger to listen for all they might contain.

Woolf’s original inspiration for the character at the heart of the story is thought to have been a society hostess called Kitty Maxse, a woman who fell suddenly to her death, and was believed to have died by suicide. While writing the novel, first titled The Hours, Woolf toyed with the idea of having Clarissa kill herself, but she ultimately let another character take that fall.

This last-minute switch is, in fact, one of the main planks of the case against honouring Mrs Dalloway. Readers can be alarmed that a woman leading such a sheltered life emerges intact, at the cost, so it might seem, of someone else’s life. Clarissa’s doomed male counterpart that June day, Septimus Warren Smith, is a shell-shocked survivor of the first world war who is given no way back to life’s daily pleasures. “Some people are upset by this choice, but I have no sense that his life is forfeited for hers,” says Brothers. “There is a tension between them and so later a release of energy that enhances life.”

Another common charge against the book is the alleged limitations of Woolf’s most conventional heroine. Why, after all, should we salute an obedient wife who merely walks to her comfortable home in Westminster via a Bond Street flower shop and some major London parks? One defence is there is much more going on. The character of Mrs Dalloway first appeared 11 years earlier in Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out, where she is drawn as a kind of parody of the bourgeoisie. So Woolf has some distance from her Clarissa.

Brothers takes up arms on behalf of Mrs Dalloway again: “It is simplistic and lazy to categorise her as either snobbish or asexual,” she says, pointing out the character’s romantic recollections of a long-ago kiss with a girl, Sally Seton; a memory that repeatedly detonates: “Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination, a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed...”

At the Cannes film festival this spring, audiences were given a fresh perspective on the perils lurking in Mrs Dalloway’s pages. When the lights went down for the premiere of Yann Gozlan’s new thriller, Dalloway, they were presented with an unnerving scene from the near future in which a lone French novelist confronts a blank page. Her personal AI assistant, Dalloway, is nursing her through a bout of writer’s block and duly projects a selection of visual prompts on to the wall.

A black and white photograph of Woolf’s final home, Monk’s House, flashes up, because the author, Clarissa, played by Cécile de France, is planning a book about Woolf’s last day. Then, without warning, the image is replaced by the face of the writer’s dead son. Dalloway is clearly playing a cruel game.

Gozlan’s sinister screenplay goes on to pit the mind of a grieving human artist against the evolving intelligence of an algorithm. So far, so Black Mirror. The thriller, to be titled The Residence when it comes out in Britain this September, is the latest in a lengthening list of works inspired by the novel. The director, best known for 2021’s Black Box, riffs on Woolf’s theme of suppressed anguish, as did the 2020 French novel it is based upon, Tatiana de Rosnay’s Les Fleurs de L’Ombre. And so too did Michael Cunningham in his 1998 bestseller The Hours, a literary hit that was also made into a film starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf. Brothers’ literary salon is to screen this film in London on 13 June at the Cinema Museum to mark the 100th “Dallowayday”.

Earlier this spring, the Charleston festival, staged in what was the Sussex home of Woolf’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, opened with a paean of appreciation for the novel in the form of readings and modern responses from writers; in the autumn, choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, a meditation on the book, is to be revived by the Royal Ballet. Last month, the actor Fenella Woolgar starred in a new two-part adaptation of Mrs Dalloway for BBC Radio 4; and this week the David Simon Contemporary gallery in Somerset has joined in, mounting an exhibition of work by 15 modern artists made in reaction to the novel.

Perhaps the most unexpected variation on Woolf’s themes will come later this week, though, in the shape of a novel by the Italian literary star Chiara Valerio. The writer has previously translated Woolf’s works for Italian readers and has a particular feeling for Mrs Dalloway.

Her bestseller The Little I Knew was influenced by its ideas and will arrive in Britain laden with expectation, since Valerio has been praised by the acclaimed writers Mariana Enríquez, Sarah Waters, Jhumpa Lahiri and Olivia Laing.

“There are many correspondences between my novel and Mrs Dalloway,” Valerio says on the phone from Italy, drawing out two elements. The first is Woolf’s “fabulous, courageous idea that everyday conversations are not continuous. Between one sentence and the next there are birds, wine, other phrases out of context, memories, deaths.” The second is the effect of social class on the way her characters express themselves.

Woolf is now a popular muse for the masses, says Valerio: “She is an icon now. You can buy a T-shirt with her brilliant, elegant, gloomy face on it.” But for the Italian writer this commercialisation cannot dilute the intensity of Mrs Dalloway, “the darkest novel about war” she has read. It chronicles, Valerio thinks, the damage inflicted by marital and romantic wars, as well as by violent military conflict.

The line “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” holds the key. “Because so do I, so often,” says Valerio. “So do a lot of women who decide to throw a party. The actual reason why one throws a party is that one is alive. One ‘parties’ because one is alive: because one can breathe, and nobody is bombing every Friday morning. Mrs Dalloway is a novel about the horrors of war: in the big world, in past loves, and in domestic life. So it is always important to celebrate being alive.”

Read Journey to the Temple, a new story by Deborah Levy inspired by Mrs Dalloway

Photographs by Getty and Alamy