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.