This was September’s Trafalgar Street Book Club (TSBC) choice, made by Simon Peters. I found my copy, a 1933 Hogarth Press edition, on eBay for just £20. A 90-year-old book is unlikely to be in great condition, and mine was mottled and cracked but still perfectly readable. Indeed, the large type and heavy paper made it very pleasant to sit with. Someone had written 1.4.38 on the inside cover. Was that when it was first read? Because we were reading Virginia Woolf it only seemed right that we should have a TSBC outing to her residence, Monk’s House, in Rodmell, and the Bloomsbury headquarters at Charleston Farmhouse. Both are just a short drive from Lewes. Even better, Charleston happened to have an exhibition about the Hogarth Press on at the time, which included some beautiful first-edition gems, including of course Mrs Dalloway. The four of us had a wonderful day out, which included an excellent lunch at the Abergavenny pub in Rodmell.

Virginia Woolf was of course a giant of early 20th century literature, still lauded today as an icon of feminism. It was her reputation as a militant feminist and a pioneer of modernist literature that had put me off trying any of her books, so this was the first of her books I’d ever read. I fully expected an unreadable man-hating rant. In fact I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mrs Dalloway does require a little effort in places, but it’s far from unreadable, and about as far from a rant as one could get.

The action takes place over a single day in central London. At its centre is Mrs Dalloway, an upper-class woman, whose husband is an MP and minister. Her day is taken up preparing for a party that evening. Woolf uses a clever technique, describing in the third-person the thoughts of different protagonists in turn in a single stream-of-consciousness with no chapter breaks. It feels rather cinematic, like a roving camera, that dances around central London, alighting in one head after another. The scene when we leave Mrs Dalloway in the flower shop and go chasing after a car carrying an important person (is it the King?), alighting on one person after another in quick succession as they notice the car passing, while at the same time a sign-writing aircraft swoops around the sky, is an astonishing piece of virtuoso writing. Other than Mrs Dalloway, the most significant character is Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran of WWI who is suffering from severe PTSD; “shell shock” from his experiences in the war. Woolf herself suffered a lifetime of mental illness and writes as someone who clearly understands what it is to experience psychosis. Septimus’s hallucinations are frighteningly real, as is the anguish of his young Italian wife, Lucrezia, who is desperate for Septimus to be cured, but doesn’t know who to turn to. We also spend time in the heads of Mrs Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth, her husband, Richard, and her ex-suitor, Peter Walsh. I found Walsh to be somewhat unbelievable. His thoughts weren’t those of a man aiming to marry a much younger woman. Where was the sexual fantasy? Perhaps Woolf, who had been a victim of sexual abuse as a child, simply couldn’t stomach the thought? Or perhaps as a woman she simply didn’t understand how central to men’s thoughts sex is? Mrs Dalloway is a rather tragic figure, not sure of her role in life, banished to a small attic bedroom in the interest of getting plenty of rest. She muses on what might have been had she married Walsh, and wonders whether her life has any meaning. I didn’t have an awful lot of sympathy for such a leisured and wealthy woman. Her self-pity seemed rather self-indulgent to me. The final scenes at the party, where all the various threads and characters are brought together, makes for a very satisfying, if rather anti-climatic, conclusion. I was half expecting Mrs Dalloway to follow Septimus and also commit suicide, but instead she just carries on. Perhaps that was the point?

This is a very clever book, and a fascinating read. I can’t say that it was wholly enjoyable though. I spent too much time thinking how clever Woolf is and rarely engaging fully with the characters. On the plus side, it did do a wonderful job of invoking London in the 1920s, the sights and sounds, and how people thought. A book one should read, rather than one really wants to read. I’m intrigued enough to perhaps try one of her other works at some point.