New book on Mrs Dalloway by Mark hussey
Mark Hussey writes about his new book, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (Manchester University Press, 2025)
When the editor Kim Walker (then at Manchester UP, now at Penguin) first pitched the idea of a ‘biography’ of Mrs Dalloway to me, I was intrigued. I was unaware that any such books existed, but, of course, as soon as I began to mention the project people told me about various similar works that had already been written. I didn’t come across anything that provided a model for what I envisaged, but reading Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece gave me inspiration.
My biography of Mrs Dalloway will appear one hundred years to the day since Woolf’s novel was published simultaneously by the Hogarth Press in Britain and Harcourt Brace in the USA: 14 May. It launches Manchester University Press’s ‘biography of a novel’ series. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel is just what its title implies: the story of how this modernist masterpiece came to be written, how it was received at the time by critics and common readers, enemies and friends, and what has been its legacy since 1925.
To quote from my Preface:
Perhaps it is Woolf’s shimmering braiding of ecstatic joy in a lovely summer’s day with the dark anguish of a mind broken by war, showing how such contraries pervade modern life, that gives Mrs Dalloway its continuing hold on our imaginations. This ‘biography’ of the novel tells its story with a focus more on the how than the whyof its persistence. It assumes familiarity with Mrs Dalloway, but it is not a work of interpretation or analysis (though inevitably it stands upon the shoulders of the many insightful critics who have written about the novel since 1925). It will follow the novel’s biography from conception to realisation; from publication to reception; and from dissemination around the globe to its reimagination in myriad forms and contexts.
My book begins by tracing Woolf’s first thoughts about what would become Mrs Dalloway, jotted down in one of her Jacob’s Room notebooks, and then following the novel’s development over the next three years. The characters who populate London on a June day in 1923, a day on which Clarissa Dalloway gives a party and Septimus Warren Smith ends his life, emerged from their author’s imagination informed by her memories of growing up in Kensington, of living through the First World War, of her own mental breakdowns, even, as Clarissa says in the novel, of ‘people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns’.
By the time she finished Jacob’s Room, Woolf was consciously positioning herself as a modernist writer with a particular relation to her readers. She had begun to think of writing a series of essays about how to read works of the past. Initially called ‘Reading’ in her notebooks, this series would take shape alongside her composition of Mrs Dalloway and be published as The Common Reader a month before the novel appeared. Woolf would maintain this pattern of moving back and forth between fiction and nonfiction for most of her life, ‘so that I can vary the side of the pillow as fortune inclines’, as she wrote in her diary in June 1922.
While she worked on her new novel, Woolf was also further developing her theories of what fiction should be, engaging with critics such as Arnold Bennett in defence of her generation of experimental writers. She thought deeply about her new novel, not yet called Mrs Dalloway, for which she had ‘almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity: I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense’. An important aspect of the biography of Mrs Dalloway, then, is Woolf’s criticism of the society she was living in, recently emerged from the First World War. Additionally, her engagement with other writers, including Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Lytton Strachey and James Joyce, threads its way throughout Mrs Dalloway’s story. I show, for example, how Joyce’s Ulysses has shadowed Mrs Dalloway from 1925 even to today.
Mrs Dalloway is a Great War novel, an early instance of those works of the 1920s which made clear that the effects of war continue to reverberate throughout society long after the guns fall silent and the treaties are signed. This seems obvious now, when ‘trauma’ has become such a common term. But in showing how war’s aftermath echoes through daily life, Mrs Dalloway was groundbreaking. In 1923, Woolf felt that she was ‘stuffed with ideas’ for her novel and wanted to ‘put everything in’ as she created a rich portrait of what was happening in London on a single day.
Inevitably, the biography of Mrs Dalloway becomes in some respects also the biography of its author. From drafts through to publication and first reviews, the story of Mrs Dalloway opens onto relationships that meant a great deal to Virginia Woolf – with Leonard, Vanessa, and Lytton; with the painter Jacques Raverat, to whom (and his wife Gwen) Woolf took the unusual step of sending a proof of the novel; with Gerald Brenan; with T. S. Eliot and Ottoline Morrell.
Once Mrs Dalloway was out in the world, it no longer belonged to its author but to readers everywhere. Woolf herself made this point in an introduction she wrote for an American Modern Library edition of the novel in 1928, the only time she took such a step for one of her own works. Biographies typically end with the death of their subject, but in the case of a novel like Mrs Dalloway publication in 1925 was only a step in a journey that continues. The second half of my biography follows Mrs Dalloway through American book clubs and library discussion groups, translations into many languages, its appearance on curricula as an example of modernist narrative techniques, and its deployment in arguments about its author that are still going on.
More than any of Woolf’s works of fiction, Mrs Dalloway has been a sort of muse for other artists in many fields. Like its protagonist’s sense of her own life, Mrs Dalloway has ‘spread ever so far’, carried through the years on the breath of thousands of readers, mingling with uncountable other stories, resonating in myriad ways with individual experiences and memories. Among the many offspring of Mrs Dalloway are other novels, plays, operas, films, ballets, comics, memes, tattoos, walks and a steady stream of social media posts whenever the purchase of flowers is involved. Woolf’s language lingers in the minds of countless readers and writers, who continue to incorporate it in their own creations in ways both large and small. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel has accounted for as many of these descendants as it can, but even today, as the book is in the final stages of production, more are appearing. There are times when it seems as if Mrs Dalloway is everywhere!
Mark Hussey, Retired Professor of English, Pace University
Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel is published by Manchester University Press on 14 May 2025. Details from MUP in the UK. Available from Barnes and Nobel in the US. Please support independent bookshops if you can: e.g. Toppings, Aldeburgh Bookshop online via Bookshop.org.
