Mrs. Dalloway – Page 2 – My Own RE:public

Looking for the real in the fictional

The title in itself is deceptive – “The real Clarissa Dalloway”. How real can a fiction be? Reality is always once removed for the writer in the very process of creating a character, and then again for the reader in the reception.

The article by David Taylor in the Times Literary Supplement (which I can’t seem to adequately date, but there is the suggestion that it was written prior to 2015) is, in the first instance, concerned with Kitty Maxse and by extension her family, rather than the fictional character created by Virginia Woolf – making a modest debut in her first novel (The Voyage Out, 1915) and coming into her own in Mrs. Dalloway ten years later – for whom Maxse may have been inspiration. Given the Stephen family’s intimate connections with the Lushingtons, and some reasonable evidence, it seems more than plausible that Woolf, at least when Clarissa Dalloway made her first appearance, was very well thinking about Kitty.

This, a cross reference with my notes on Virginia Woolf’s diary in which I comment on her entry of 8th October 1922 upon learning of Kitty’s untimely (and unusual) death. She does indeed say that she hadn’t spoken with Kitty since 1908; and this being approximately the time she began talking about Melymbrosia (especially with Clive Bell), and a time in which both Stephen sisters were irredeemably lost to tradition and convention (personified by Kitty Maxse).

Knowing 1922 to have been approximately when Woolf began working on “The Hours” (to become Mrs. Dalloway), I must say I did wonder whether Maxse’s death may have rekindled her interest in Clarissa Dalloway. Returning to my notes, I see that Woolf had in fact written the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” in the summer of that year (though it wouldn’t be published until 1923) and a project with the title “The Hours” is mentioned for the first time (in her diary) in conversation with E.M. Forster in May, 1923.

Dalloway Day 2020

More recent than Bloomsday, but showing signs of becoming a permanent fixture of the literary calendar, is Dalloway Day – this year the Royal Society of Literature takes the 96th Wednesday after that of Clarissa Dalloway’s party into the virtual world – to which we are still bound by virtue [sic] of the corona pandemic.

The British Library blog also has an entry with their own contributions, and cross referencing to the RSL and others.

Especially interesting this year, and in light of the discussions about race, is an aural tour exploring the black heritage on London streets once walked perhaps by a Mrs. Dalloway and most certainly by Virginia Woolf. Following is the audio tour on Soundcloud, and here is an accompanying interactive map.

We are all Mrs. Dalloway

“We are all Mrs. Dalloway now.” says Evan Kindley in The New Yorker. Well, it may well be that many of us can’t afford to be – she is, after all, a lady of means, of a certain class. But I do get the point – the simple pleasures, the granted freedoms; of a walk in the streets, buying flowers, having a party – for us now laden with the aura of nostalgia and even adventure.

And, at the very least, we crave some moments, however fleeting, like those shrouding Clarissa Dalloway on that beautiful June morning in 1923 London; tempering her disquiet and apprehensions in the aftermath of war and illness, and allowing her instead to revel for a time in the bustle of city life.

From page to stage (II)

Continuing with a topic I have recently been thinking about, I have come upon an interesting essay; inspired by a stage version of Mrs. Dalloway, it is a couple of years old but makes pertinent observations just the same, and not necessarily specific to Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of just how often I wonder at the fortitude or foolhardiness of some theatrical or cinematic adaptations from the literary moderne of a century ago, and whether some forms are just better left as they were intended. The conservative in me speaks.

Considering the 2018 experimental production at the Arcola Theater in London, Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” and its film adaptation, Jo Glanville ponders, with reference to renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, how adequate any adaptation of Woolf’s work can ever be, and especially here Mrs. Dalloway, composed as it is of a fragmentary flow of imagination and memory – unordered, even chaotic.

… Woolf evokes the very experience of being alive through a ceaseless poetic chain of thoughts, responses and memories as the narrative shifts between the world within and the world outside. In an essay on the novel, Hermione Lee quotes from Woolf’s correspondence with the painter Jacques Raverat while she was writing Mrs Dalloway. Raverat wrote that it was not possible to represent the way our minds respond to an idea or experience in a linear narrative. Woolf responded that it’s the job of a writer to go beyond ‘the formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream […] all over the place’. How can an adaptation recreate that effect?…
Boundless, Unbound.com

Glanville doesn’t exactly answer the question she poses, and appears as sceptical as I tend to be, but nevertheless clearly admires the bravura in having a go, for better or worse, at transforming all the fleeting moments, shadings of emotions, muddled thoughts that make Mrs. Dalloway such a splendid work of literature, into a “real time” experience of sorts. When it’s all said and done, any attempt to capture the haunted past and let it mingle amongst the crowded present is very much in the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps an adequate enough reason after all. Bring them on – the reworkings, the inspired appropriations! The radical now raises her voice.

Clarissa’s other party

Doing some podcast catching up over Christmas, I particularly liked an episode of “The Essay” from BBC Radio 3 in which Bernardine Evarista imagines another ending to Mrs. Dalloway.

In fact, several things Evarista says in her (audio) essay interest me. Firstly, “To the Lighthouse” was her first encounter with Virginia Woolf, but that contrary to my immediate delight on reading this book many years ago, she as a girl of colour yearning to discover something of herself in the books she read, was left cold by the very white, very English world of the Ramsays, and so concluded Woolf had nothing to say to her. A lot later then came Mrs. Dalloway into the life of the the mature writer Evarista, comfortable now in her skin and in her person, she sees the fearless experimentalist writer that also does “skin”; differently, inhabiting the skin of her characters. Evarista it seems can at last appreciate the unique genius of Woolf. (And, in this audio, speak beautifully on it.)

Thinking of Mrs. Dalloway not so long ago, I too used the expression “a day in the life of” , but Evarista cleverly takes our shared expression one step further; turning it around and adding “…or a life in a day”, thereby getting to the very essence of the novel; unmasking the shallow exterior to reveal the history and complexity of an inner life, and not just that of Clarissa Dalloway, for all the characters carry the baggage that a life brings; strewn as it is with regrets, dissatisfactions, repressions, be they emotional, sexual or matters of practical predicament.

Bernadine Evarista’s ending is a reimagining of the character of Lady Rossiter – Sally – Clarissa’s intimate friend of youth, such that, instead of bowing to the restrictions of convention and society, Sally leads still the spirited, free life so promised in that rebellious girl long ago.

The Hours MS

A favourite “day in the life of” if ever there was one, is brought to mind again with The New York Times reporting on the publication of a new reproduction of the full draft of what was tentatively titled “The Hours” and was to become Mrs. Dalloway. Absolutely beyond my modest budget, but an imagined treasure just the same!

*Cover design Vanessa Bell, Hogarth Press, 1925.*

Beyond the title, revealed (to me anyway!) is the metamorphose of Virginia Woolf’s initial idea of a grand post-war London narrative into a deceptively more modest work. The minutiose account of one woman on one day endures as one of the finest character studies in modern literature.

By the way, I’m collecting all things that come my way relating somehow to Mrs. Dalloway here, where links are also to be found to “The Hours” manuscripts held at the British Library.