The Hinge and Plunge of Modernist Prose: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

The latest edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is published by the New York Review of Books (Distributed by Penguin Random House Canada) and edited by Edward Mendelson. As Mendelson explains in his textual notes, “There can be no ‘definitive’ edition of a novel written by an author who had better things to do than sanitize its inconsistencies or police the intervention of compositors and printers.” Accordingly, multiple editions of Mrs. Dalloway seem to mimic Woolf’s streams of consciousness in characters swimming through various editions, changing and rearranging their minds. Without her sanitizing or policing, we are free to choose among several editions. The advantage of Mendelson’s compact edition is that he presents the novel without any cumbersome introduction, and finishes with editorial commentary only after we have concluded the novel.

This edition may be contrasted with the more elaborate annotated edition edited by Merve Emre. Emre provides a lengthy introduction and her text is studded with photographs and paintings that enrich Woolf’s words. The novel’s opening sentence, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” is surrounded by commentary and her sister Vanessa Bell’s painting of flowers whose openness reflects the consciousnesses of various characters in the novel. Consisting of a single sentence, the opening paragraph abruptly introduces the protagonist’s independence, but also her dependence on household servants.

The next paragraph elaborates her situation through grammatical dependency: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” This dependent clause could have formed part of the first sentence, but by separating it, Woolf adds to her narrative rhythm of Clarissa Dalloway’s urban walking and thinking. Like the cut flowers, servant Lucy’s work is cut out for her, the self-reflexive “for her” echoing both Clarissa’s “herself” and “For Lucy.” Their work schedule becomes more inclusive and extensive: “The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumplemayer’s men were coming.” Unhinged, the doors would admit more of the fresh air while Rumplemayer’s men deliver European pastry. Stylistic hinges rely on semi-colons and swinging conjunctions: “And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” Morning does not follow “then” or Rumplemayer’s men, but rather Clarissa’s flowing thoughts, which turn lyrical after the dash in a simile that groups fresh, issued, and beach children – themselves the issue of adults.

The third paragraph stretches further: “What a lark! What a plunge!” These two exclamations speak to the rise and fall of waves at the beach, and they hinge to the next sentence, which picks up the earlier rhythm of “For” and “hinge” in poetic prose: “For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.” From squeak to burst, this enthusiastic plunge into open air parallels children’s plunge into waves, and Clarissa’s purposeful outing in the city to prepare for her dinner. Waves of thoughts gather in the next sentence as little squeaks become larger sounds: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave.” The semi-colon hinges flap, kiss, and mounting sibilants to “chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen.” Her rhythmic adjectives are interrupted by a parenthesis that takes us back in time, as the temporal dislocation is enhanced by the spatial one at the window. After the exuberance and bounce, a plunge into solemn and awful – amid Clarissa’s gait and grammar.

Which wander to the next semi-colon, as memory takes two steps backward for every step ahead: “looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?’” Two “looking” verbs bracket actions of winding, rising, falling, standing in a perceptual field that confounds past and present – flowers in front of her, flowers from memory, and Peter Walsh’s “I prefer men to cauliflowers.” Yet Clarissa’s memory is not entirely reliable, as the repeated “was that it?” testifies.

Where Clarissa’s mind wanders and ponders, Woolf punctuates reliably. Clarissa muses on men – specifically Peter Walsh, who is to return from India, any day in June or July, depending on her memory. She remembers his sayings amidst a multitude of impressions: “when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.” Flights of fancy are simultaneously down to earth since millions of lives had vanished during World War One, which is one of the backdrops to this novel. “Strange” stands out not only in its envelope of dashes and exclamation, but also in its repetition at the bottom of the page surrounded by sounds of the city: “in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead.” Woolf’s song is strange and familiar in London, in June 1925 when human nature changes.

Clarissa stiffens a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. Her mind proceeds from that commercial pause to her neighbours: “A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her.” His unusual name may be a visual play on scope and purview, as the sentence flits between neighbours: “(knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness.” With her bird’s-eye view, the omniscient narrator knows neighbours and presents colours from different perspectives, dropping hints of health along the way. “There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.” For all her clarity of vision, Clarissa never sees her neighbour, but remains alert to the passage of time and traffic from her stiff verticality, waiting for the next paragraph to propel her forward. Hinged at the corner of consciousness, the protagonist plunges into life for her party.

Those hinges of semi-colons, parentheses, and dashes recur in dependent clauses and sentences that work through hours and years. Accompanied by Proust’s lost recipe for madeleines and Leopold Bloom’s Dublin parade in Ulysses, Woolf takes her Modernist sentences on a stroll. “For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, -- one feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush or solemnity; an indescribable pause;” Clarissa’s street party, Woolf’s parade of syntax, and the mind’s quest for the quotidian – the question of how many years partly answered, the waking and walking rhythm where “positive” is arrested in “pause” of semi-colon. The sound of hush and the indescribable described: “a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes.” This parenthesis acts as a kind of stethoscope between clock hours and years of suffering, manifest in the whiteness of her illness. For every upbeat moment, a plunge downward.

Big Ben is the heartbeat of the city: “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.” She sounds the warning, rhymes musical and irrevocable, and chimes the hour to create a sonic path: “The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street.” This dependable boom continues to spread significance: “For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.” After the circles, a tumbling plunge and hinge of semi-colon, followed by class structure: “but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.” Love bookends that sentence that encircles life in all class structures.

The paragraph’s final sentence offers further evidence of the plenitude and circularity of loved life: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” The Roaring ‘Twenties makes its way into this jazzed-up sentence of modernist, Whitmanesque inclusiveness. The swing and swinging of semi-colons halting the metropolitan traffic of sounds and motion in Woolf’s omnibus phrases and clauses, class distinctions, urban sprawl. Woolf’s polyphonic moments gain momentum.

Amidst her June fanfare of exuberance, the plunge of the past: “The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed … but it was over; thank Heaven – over.” This triple repetition implies that the trauma is far from over: it will linger in moment, hour, month and year. Woolf then stretches an all-encompassing sentence with its hinging semi-colons: “And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it;” Early in the day of Modernism, the omniscient narrator describes omnipresence around London in beating sounds of galloping ponies and the et cetera of rest of it. The city’s cacophony is “wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air,” as London’s lyricism further unfolds: “which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies.” As the random and routine narrative unwinds, the ponies pitch through Woolf’s prose.

On Clarissa’s way to the flower shop with its own abundance, Woolf weighs a pastoral tradition against machines in the urban garden, Modernism holding Romanticism in check: “the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run;” London’s circus ranges from bouncing ponies to whirling young men to woolly dogs – all in metropolitan prose motion. The long list goes on to include old dowagers “shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery.” Woolf’s panorama covers all ages, while “shooting out” prepares for the mystery of the “pistol shot” and “violent explosion” which makes Mrs. Dalloway jump (itself a preparation for Septimus Smith’s suicidal leap in the novel’s secondary plot).

Commerce takes over the rest of the sentence with its restless class consciousness: “and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.” The author traverses centuries from Georgian roots to contemporary settings, while the parenthesis points to the Elizabethan family line in Clarissa’s daughter. The ambivalence of absurd and faithful points to Woolf’s Bloomsbury liberation from courtly roots of Victorian tradition. Clarissa remains the source of light participating in city life and preparing for her party. The paragraph ends with another fidgety sentence that veers from birds to buildings, and finally another character, Hugh Whitbread – his name displaying colours and sounds of the novelist’s prose, as well as her witty consciousness.

Elsewhere Woolf has stated her aesthetic approach: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” This is certainly true of the carnivalesque of consciousness found in Mrs. Dalloway, as is another of Woolf’s statements: “I can take my way; experiment with my own imagination in my own way.” Mrs. Dalloway is her own experimental way that invites Shakespeare, Keats, and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to the table. A century later, this Modernist masterpiece that takes place in a single and singular day is one for the ages.

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About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941) was an English writer whose novels, which often experimented with form, exercised a profound influence on the genre. Among her most famous works of fiction are To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway and her book of essays, A Room of One's Own, is one of the best-known works of literary and social criticism in the English language.

Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. His books include The Things That Matter—about seven novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf—and Early Auden and Later Auden. His book The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway will be published in September 2025. He lives in New York.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature. He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• September 16, 2025

• Pages: 224

• ISBN: 9781681379982