Mrs Dalloway

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A sad lot!! - Rated
I have always struggled to read Virginia Woolf but I finished this with great satisfaction tinged with bemusement. Most of the characters are seriously mad. Richard Dalloway is the only one who is even remotely sane - and the only one who has a job. This may be more than coincidence. The others have far too much time for egocentic languishings which doesn't help their edge of sanity status. Septimus Smith was mad before he was shell-shocked in WW1 - he seemed only to go to war to fight for Shakespeare! Peter Walsh is a drifter and Clarissa Dalloway is utterly self-absorbed. One wonders if she would have taken her own life had she had more to think about than her own ego-centric stream of consciousness. This was a very good read but I think it will be my only successful flirtation with V.W. I only read it after someone gave me a copy of Michael Cunningham's "The Hours".

really rather irritating - Rated
My teacher's decision to study Mrs Dalloway for A Level was met with a great deal of frustration. Some had tried to read it, some had merely watched the film, but most of us knew it as the book our mothers love. I read it before lessons began (as one should with literature which always loses something if looked at through A Level eyes...), and found myself stuck. The writing style is of course innovative and interesting - stream of consciousness, very little dialogue - but I felt Woolf forgot to actually invent a plot along the way.

I am probably too young really to understand the feelings of a 53 year old woman. It was unfortunate to be in the mind of a woman who considers her life to be finished, just at the point of setting out for university - I don't recommend this to teenagers. I don't think a book entirely devoted to revealing the normality of someone's brain patterns is really very interesting. As it is, it seems to me that Woolf was too consumed with her clever narrative style, and neglected to offer any memorable plot. In fact the sub-plot of Septimus Warren Smith was the only element I found to keep me reading to the end - he is overall a more vivid, detailed and emotive character, and I found myself flicking on to find the next passage about him and his interesting wife Luzrezia. Clarissa, in comparison, bored me, and the excuse that she is not supposed to be defined ('never say of someone they are this or they are that') just seemed to me an excuse.

I would not recommend this to a young woman excited by life and the future - Clarissa's melancholy manages to instil negativity in almost everything, even her own daughter. Yes, Clarissa appreciates the life going on around her (eg, the bees buzzing, ducks waddling...) but she is so infuriatingly detached that her little comments about the joys of living mean nothing.

I've since looked at Woolf's Orlando and have found it to be much wittier and more interesting, and entirely different. Might it be that the world has mistaken Mrs Dalloway for a literary materpiece when all it actually represents is an experiment in narrative, during a time of depression in Woolf's life?

A thoroughly modern masterpiece - Rated
I picked this book up directly after reading 'To the Lighthouse' and I must say that nothing describes these two novels better that to call them 'prose poems'. They are two differing experiments in structure and style and as such it takes a few pages to grasp their unfamiliarity.

For instance in Mrs Dalloway there can be times when there is a proliferation of new characters names, which if you try to follow each name as in a conventional novel it can be a bit daunting. The moment of revelation for me came when I realised that the device of naming fleeting characters is used in order to heighten their subjective opinions! If it was a film I suppose it would be the equivalent of passing through twenty or more narrators. The interplay of differing subjective opinions/emotions is breathtaking.

Not only this, but the narrative leaps around London with similar ease. In fact the syntax of the plot is pure cinema - the sensual and the emotional wins through.

What also hit me was how incredibly modern some of the subject matter is. There is a lead character suffering from shell shock who is presented via his own first person psychology! - It is at times harrowing and other times uplifting (especially the scene with the hat!!!) - always convincing.

Unmasking society and experimenting with past and present - Rated
MRS DALLOWAY

Virginia Woolf's fourth novel (1925) can be regarded as her first real approach to maturity, since she experiments with time and mingles present experience and past memories in an artistic way. Apart from the formal innovations, Woolf does not avoid the thematic challenge either: "I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense", she notes in her diary.
Mrs. Dalloway is set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, and we follow Clarissa Dalloway, the elegant wife of a Member of Parliament and perfect London hostess, through the course of this day which is going to culminate in the party she is going to give in the evening.
But there is much more to the novel than the superficial level of social activities: interwoven with the public world of post-war Britain is the female protagonist's inner life and her ambivalence about her other self - she wishes both to escape the social life and to enter it more fully; she feels both sheltered and anonymous, useful and trivial, committed and deluded.
Clarissa is looking for meaning in her life, primarily in her past, and we learn, among many other things, that she has chosen the safety of marriage to the rather ponderous Richard as opposed to the unpredictability of a life with Peter Walsh or the scandal of a relationship with a woman in order to preserve her own private self.
Virginia Woolf is interested in human personality and convicted of the right of the individual to possess and to cultivate their identity. Clarissa is thrown into a field of polar tensions in which on the one hand she strives for individuality and tries to distance herself from her environment; but in which on the other hand she also feels that she has to step out of her seclusion in order to take part in society.
And she proves herself capable of asserting herself in the life of society with courage and instinct. She is permanently ready to serve, to help and to support, seeing her role in society in terms of a personal task: through her parties she attempts to save people from their solitude, to establish relationships between them and make them feel the beauties of life.
Virginia Woolf has a gift to see behind people's social masks and to reveal in a very beautiful way how people live, how they love and hate, fear and long, and cope with the pleasures as well as the difficulties of everyday existence.

Fragmented moments - Rated
If you are looking for a narrative packed with exciting events, a story that will keep you thinking 'What'll happen next?' then Eileen Atkins's reading of "Mrs Dalloway" is not the tape for you. Virginia Woolf's novel does not have an exhilarating plot. It is not an eventful story. Neither is it peopled with unusual characters. It is, perhaps, a medium through which you might experience what Woolf termed a 'moment of being', the sudden revelation central to her writing at its finest.

Eileen Atkins is the author of "Vita and Virginia"; a dramatization of the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West from the women's meeting in the early nineteen-twenties to Virginia's suicide in 1942. The depth of her understanding of Woolf is evident as she reads "Mrs Dalloway" perfectly, bringing out every nuance in the calm surface of the text, insisting the listener weighs the significance of the echoes of a refrain from Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" ('Fear no more the heat of the sun'), while delighting to surprise us with Woolf's sudden expletives: 'What a lark! What a plunge!'

This recording, like most audio books, is an abridgement of the original text. Many books, particularly long novels written in the realist tradition, are abridged with great success, delivering them to a new 'readership' via a different medium. This is not true of Virginia Woolf's fiction. 'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day', Woolf suggests in "The Common Reader", 'The mind receives a myriad impressions....is it not the task of the novelist to convey this?' In "Mrs Dalloway" the cause-and-effect narrative of the realist tradition is abandoned. The 'scaffolding' of the realist plot is taken down; there is 'scarcely a brick to be seen' in this critique of social convention. Instead, Woolf's reader follows an apparently random chain of external happenings and thought-processes that comprise a single June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. It is a beautiful, delicate novel, woven out of what its author called 'incantation and mystery', in which the social message is communicated via metaphor, allusion, rhythm, and repetition. Despite Ms Atkins's inspired reading of the text, the abridgment of the novel is a series of crude intrusions into those 'moments of being' that are its life force

Eileen Atkins is a first-class narrator so, despite my personal misgivings, I feel sure that many devotees of Woolf's fiction will enjoy this recording. However, it is certainly not a substitute for the unabridged text of "Mrs Dalloway". Listeners seeking to deepen their understanding of Virginia Woolf, her novels, and wider literary world would do well to read Hermione Lee's excellent critical biography and the text of Eileen Atkins's "Vita and Virginia".