Mrs. Dallowayall the time had grey hair. She first seems in Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915)—trilling, ladylike, usually imperious, and searching “like an eighteenth-century masterpiece,” with a pink face and “hair turning gray.” She doesn’t appear to age or regress between The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, which was revealed 10 years later and is now celebrating its a centesimal anniversary. In that novel, her hair is tinged the identical shade, and she or he has “a contact of the hen about her, of the jay, blue-green, gentle, vivacious.” Then the kicker: “although she was over fifty.”
The novel’s centennial has occasioned a flurry of occasions and new editions, however not as a lot consideration of what I’d argue is probably the most enduring and private theme of the work: It’s a masterpiece of midlife disaster. Woolf was 40 when she started writing the novel, a decade youthful than her protagonist however within the midst of what she known as her personal “center age.” As she chronicled in her crackling, astute diary, it was a second to weigh what one has made and might make of a life.
For Woolf, it ignited a inventive hearth. In the summertime of 1923, about midway by means of her work on Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote, “My concept is that at 40 one both will increase the tempo or slows down. For sure which I want.” She went on to catalog her in depth ongoing tasks, together with an essay on Chaucer, the revision of a slew of outdated essays, and what she termed “ ‘critical’ studying.” And all of this got here throughout a sustained burst of fiction writing that Woolf—whose work had been derailed by psychological breakdowns and spells of sickness—relished. From the autumn of 1922 by means of 1924, she obtained Mrs. Dalloway on paper at a livid charge; in doing so, she reckoned with the incongruity of center age as she lived it.
The defining characteristic of midlife is its formlessness. It takes the form of what it isn’t—not youth, not outdated age. (Is 40 outdated or younger? How about 50?) But it’s a section of large transformation: for some an interlude of welcome stability during which they will take inventory, for others a time to take new dangers. It doesn’t need for literary examples—the work of current fiction writers together with Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, and Miranda July, for instance, revolves round ladies reflecting on their decisions halfway by means of life. In content material, if not in fashion, all of them owe one thing to Mrs. Dalloway.
The novel’s opening—with its well-known first line, “Mrs. Dalloway mentioned she would purchase the flowers herself”—is itself a sort of center. It launches the reader into Clarissa Dalloway’s morning, into “life; London; this second of June.” Early on a Wednesday in 1923, within the shadow of the Nice Warfare and an influenza pandemic, Clarissa is shopping for these flowers for a celebration she is throwing that night. The remainder of the novel follows a number of characters in a collection of streams of consciousness: Clarissa as she experiences the unfolding hours and prepares for her company; her former lover, Peter Walsh, who wonders whether or not he can take into account his life successful; a World Warfare I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith, who’s rapidly descending into shell-shock-triggered insanity; and quite a lot of different Londoners. Over the course of that single June day, they ponder each other, their world, and their locations in it.
Clarissa, the spouse of a member of Parliament, has chosen a snug existence and a steady companion—maybe on the expense of journey. However she was as soon as an nearly wayward lady, tempted to marry Peter and embark on a extra unorthodox course. She ponders all of this as she strikes by means of her busy day, mentally lurching ahead and backward in time. And as she does so, she considers her actions in gentle of her age. When she walks to purchase the flowers, as an example, she asserts that “she felt very younger; on the similar time unspeakably aged.” Peter unexpectedly comes to go to after years in India, touching off a torrent of occupied with whether or not she is previous her prime: “It was throughout for her,” she thinks. “The sheet was stretched and the mattress slim.” And as she readies herself and her home for the get together that night,
she had a sudden spasm, as if, whereas she mused, the icy claws had had the possibility to repair in her. She was not outdated but. She had simply damaged into her fifty-second yr. Months and months of it have been nonetheless untouched. June, July, August! Every nonetheless remained nearly entire.
Age’s attendant regrets and hopes have spurred a disaster inside Clarissa.
It’s additionally extremely believable that she has entered menopause, or what Woolf later termed in her diary “T of L” (for “Time of Life”). Clarissa has lately been sick, however in deflecting the point out of a pal’s “ladies’s illnesses,” she makes clear that no matter hormonal flux is or isn’t taking place, this isn’t a topic she’ll talk about. She is the appropriate age for it, and she or he does see herself as “shrivelled, aged, breastless.” What may extra readily deliver a couple of disaster of identification than the bodily alteration of the physique, the change from bearer of life to barren girl?
Clarissa’s extra existential concern is one which events so many midlife crises—that at 51, she has missed out on some superior array of experiences; that one other path would have led to a brisker, happier variant of herself. Woolf’s trademark stream of consciousness, her fast and seamless strikes from one character or expertise to a different, implies that the previous, current, and future intertwine as if no barrier separates them. And so Clarissa doesn’t ponder her previous a lot as transfer by means of it. The touchstones of her youth—a kiss from her insouciant pal Sally Seton, a transcendent night spent on the terrace of a rustic home, her close to engagement to Peter—are as alive to her because the mending she does that morning or the lonesome loss of life she imagines for herself in outdated age.
That aliveness and sense of immediacy are what animate Woolf’s prose—and her heroine. Clarissa ultimately basks within the unmitigated pleasure “that sooner or later ought to observe one other; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one ought to get up within the morning; see the sky; stroll within the park.” Her recollections, she tells herself, are largely good. Because the day progresses, she thinks that “center age,” at the very least for her, is “mediocrity,” however then summons her inside knowledge and can to drive “herself along with her indomitable vitality to place all that apart.” The core of the novel is Clarissa’s realization that life is occurring within the current tense, and so that’s the place she should be.
Mrs. Dallowaywaswritten at a private turning level for Woolf, too. She moved in early 1924 from a Georgian brick pile within the suburbs of Richmond to a townhouse within the bustling London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, the place her social calendar usually outpaced her. She had initially gone to Richmond for the quiet and relaxation that her medical doctors and husband insisted she wanted. That’s, till Woolf started a marketing campaign to maneuver again to London correct, the place, she wrote, she might “dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy.” London was certainly one of her nice loves, and the observations in Mrs. Dalloway of its vibrant ambiance have been Woolf’s as effectively. The change of surroundings freed the writer to rattle herself within the service of her artwork and, regardless of persevering with to query her talents, lastly declare pleasure in her fiction. Though she would dwell solely 17 years extra, committing suicide in 1941, this was the start of Woolf’s center age. It was a season of fruitfulness earlier than she succumbed to the psychological sickness that had stalked her—a interval during which she produced her most profound work.
The pleasure she present in London—within the motion of our bodies on the sidewalk, the towering spire of St. Pancras Church—and due to this fact in life, was so potent as a result of it forged her inside darkness in aid. Woolf, who had endured the deaths of siblings and each mother and father, who had been confined to mattress on a milk-and-meat eating regimen throughout a number of breakdowns, was decided, particularly in Mrs. Dalloway, to position life subsequent to loss of life, to encompass midlife with the scrumptious pleasures of each youth and maturity.
For one temporary interval, and in a single magnificent, enduring novel, life emerged the victor. A couple of yr and a half into writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf encountered a harmful anniversary, that of her mom’s loss of life in 1895, which had occasioned immense misery in 13-year-old Woolf. But on today, she shook off her malaise and wrote, “However sufficient of loss of life—its [sic] life that issues.” That day, she recalled how even the best chore, weeding, had earlier despatched her into matches of ecstasy, describing “how the quiet lapped me spherical” after which “how the wonder brimmed over me & steeped my nerves until they quivered.” Clarissa finds herself in the same second at her get together: Demise has proven up on her doorstep within the type of the information {that a} younger man—Septimus Smith—has thrown himself from a window and died. “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the midst of my get together, right here’s loss of life.” However then she steps into the popularity that, regardless of the selections she’s made, or maybe due to them, “she had by no means been so joyful. Nothing could possibly be sluggish sufficient; nothing final too lengthy.”
The clock strikes, the get together begins to disperse, the outdated woman throughout the road seems her gentle for mattress, and Clarissa Dalloway notes, “What a unprecedented evening!” What a unprecedented day.
*Lead picture sources: Sasha / Hulton Archive / Getty; Olga Korneeva / Getty
This text seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “Mrs. Dalloway’s Midlife Disaster.”
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