The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

by Merve Emre, Virginia Woolf

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking novel, in a lushly illustrated hardcover edition with illuminating commentary from a brilliant young Oxford scholar and critic.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf's much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been viewed not only as Woolf's masterpiece, but as a pivotal work of literary modernism and one of the most significant and influential novels of the twentieth century. In this visually powerful annotated edition, acclaimed Oxford don and literary critic Merve Emre gives us an authoritative version of this landmark novel, supporting it with generous commentary that reveals Woolf's aesthetic and political ambitions—in Mrs. Dalloway and beyond—as never before.

Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place over the course of a single day in late June, its plot centering on the upper-class Londoner Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to throw a party that evening for the nation's elite. But the novel is complicated by Woolf's satire of the English social system, and by her groundbreaking representation of consciousness. The events of the novel flow through the minds and thoughts of Clarissa and her former lover Peter Walsh and others in their circle, but also through shopkeepers and servants, among others. Together Woolf's characters—each a jumble of memories and perceptions—create a broad portrait of a city and society transformed by the Great War in ways subtle but profound ways. No figure has been more directly shaped by the conflict than the disturbed veteran Septimus Smith, who is plagued by hallucinations of a friend who died in battle, and who becomes the unexpected second hinge of the novel, alongside Clarissa, even though—in one of Woolf's many radical decisions—the two never meet.

Emre's extensive introduction and annotations follow the evolution of Clarissa Dalloway—based on an apparently conventional but actually quite complex acquaintance of Woolf's—and Septimus Smith from earlier short stories and drafts of Mrs. Dalloway to their emergence into the distinctive forms devoted readers of the novel know so well. For Clarissa, Septimus, and her other creations, Woolf relied on the skill of “character reading,” her technique for bridging the gap between life and fiction, reality and representation. As Emre writes, Woolf's “approach to representing character involved burrowing deep into the processes of consciousness, and, so submerged, illuminating the infinite variety of sensation and perception concealed therein. From these depths, she extracted an unlimited capacity for life.” It is in Woolf's characters, fundamentally unknowable but fundamentally alive, that the enduring achievement of her art is most apparent.

For decades, Woolf's rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, featuring 150 illustrations, draws on decades of Woolf scholarship as well as countless primary sources, including Woolf's private diaries and notes on writing. The result is not only a transporting edition of Mrs. Dalloway, but an essential volume for Woolf devotees and an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature.

Release date: August 31, 2021

Publisher: Liveright

Print pages: 320

Sample

INTRODUCTION

I.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, traces a single summer day in the lives of two people whose paths never cross: Clarissa Dalloway, just over fifty, elegant, charming, and self-possessed, the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament; and Septimus Warren Smith, a solitary ex-soldier, a prophetic man haunted by visions he cannot explain to his anguished wife Lucrezia. Clarissa spends the day preparing for the party she will give later that night—buying flowers, managing servants, mending a dress, and receiving her old suitor, Peter Walsh, whose sudden reappearance in her life recalls her to the passion and freedom of their youth. While she and Peter reminisce, Septimus is in Regent’s Park hallucinating. Given to thoughts of suicide, he visits an unsympathetic doctor at his wife’s insistence. He throws himself from a window in the early evening, and several hours later, word that “a young man had killed himself” reaches Clarissa at her party.

Clarissa observes her guests and sees that they are oblivious to the disaster, the disgrace of death. She walks into an empty room, and in a moment of astonishing reverie, considers what her life has been—what any life must be: “the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.” Against this fear, her love of life rushes from her with a sense of triumph, with the rapture of existence—the sheer joy of being alive to experience all that the world still has to offer someone like her. She returns to her party, where Peter Walsh waits, eager to see her for the second time that day. “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?” She enters the room. “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.” The novel ends.

II.

I READ Mrs. Dalloway for the first time when I was maybe ten or eleven, too young to make much sense of it. It was summer. I was away from home, though I cannot recall where or why exactly—only that the mornings spread upon a countryside very green and bright, and that the days were hot, and longer than one felt they had any right to be. What I do remember, with a clarity that startles me, is a letter I received and opened with excitement, a letter I kept for many years. It was written on a sheet of paper torn from a composition notebook, with obvious care taken not to jag the edges. The writer was a friend from school, a boy to whom I had mailed my copy of Mrs. Dalloway after I finished so he could read it too. With the novel, I must have enclosed a letter of my own offering him some explanation, some insistence that he not only read Mrs. Dalloway but read my copy of it, and see something of us reflected in the pages I had annotated—most likely, the scenes about being young and half in love. Once he had read it, he was indignant and excited. “You were wrong,” he wrote. “We’re not Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Walsh. We are Jake Barnes and Lady Ashley from ‘The Sun Also Rises’ by one Ernest Hemingway. Don’t jump to conclusions halfway through. Read the book to the end . . . the very end.”

The self-seriousness of this exchange has been leveled by time, by the sheepishness and irony that this absurdly heady flirtation now summons. Reading the letter today, I feel embarrassed on behalf of our younger selves, for whatever childish misunderstanding had led us to believe that our relationship was well represented by either Clarissa and Peter, the repressed upper-class English wife and the dull, mawkish civil servant she refused to marry, or Lady Bret Ashley and Jake Barnes, the sexually liberated English divorcee and the impotent American journalist she loved too much to shake loose. Yet I confess to feeling some distant admiration for the readers we had been. I believe we had intuited something essential about novels, and about Mrs. Dalloway in particular, when we sought some continuity between our lives and the lives we read about in fiction. It must have seemed possible, even desirable to us, that her fictional characters would help us relieve “the pressure of an emotion” and feel the shape of a thought; would offer us a glimpse of the ever-deepening “colors, salts, tones of existence” that Woolf described in Clarissa’s meditations on youth and its discoveries. In creating Peter and Clarissa, she had laid a narrow spit of land between our lives and her art, on which she had scattered a procession of moods and postures, scraps of conversation that allowed us not just to endow her characters with the semblance of reality but to try on parts of it as our own.

Mrs. Dalloway let me sense what I would come to understand only later, that a fictional character is a marvelously and perplexingly hybrid creature. She is a piece of writing, and as such, is made up “of words, of images, of imaginings,” writes John Frow. But she also requires the pretense of existence: the belief, however wide-eyed or fantastical, that from behind these words, or from within their vaporous trail, there rises a distinctly human shape. It is this shape who beckons to her readers, who swiftly and assuredly ushers them into her world as fellow travelers. It is she who extends the invitation to her party. So charmed are we by her presence—how is it that people can spring from nothing more than marks on a page?—that we are insensible to the fact that she is but the middleman, brokering a more far-flung relationship. Behind her stands our true hostess: the writer, exceptionally well-disguised.

This is, at least, how Woolf imagined the relationship between readers, writers, and characters in her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which she wrote at the same time as Mrs. Dalloway, and which gives expression to the same philosophy of character as the novel. Characters were to serve as a “common meeting-place” between the writer and her reader. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” cast the writer and the reader as two strangers getting to know one another in a distant, impersonal way, learning through characters how to calibrate each other’s sensibilities and thoughts. In Woolf’s view, their fellowship was like the rapport that “the perfect hostess” (Peter’s memorable description of Clarissa) cultivated with an unknown guest—the kind of guest who arrives at a party alone, unannounced and empty-handed, and must be coaxed into conversation with others, those whom the hostess can rely on to be courteous and entertaining, lest he begin to trail her from room to room. “Both in life and in literature, it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other,” Woolf wrote. “The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to cooperate in the far more difficult business of intimacy.”

So stimulated, the reader learns how to be the writer’s accomplice in what Woolf called the art of “character-reading”: a practice of observing, of speculating about, people, both in life and in fiction. The adept character-reader was one who fixed people with a powerful, sympathetic, and searching gaze; who seized on their unobtrusive moments—their small habits, their humble memories, their incessant chatter—to grasp the full force of their spirit, their being. Character-reading was an everyday talent, imminently useful and even necessary. “Indeed, it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had some skill in the art,” Woolf wrote. “Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; everyday questions arise which can only be solved by its help.” Though character-reading could smooth the social tribulations of adult life, Woolf held it to be, first and foremost, the art of the young. They drew on it for “friendships and other adventures and experiments” that were less frequently embarked on in middle or old age, when character-reading retreated from its inventiveness, its candid curiosity, and became a dutiful, pragmatic exercise, a way to avoid misunderstandings and arguments.

The novelist was distinct among adults. She was a perpetual youth, preoccupied with the lives of others long after it was either necessary or prudent. Character-reading clutched at her first as “an absorbing pursuit,” then as an obsession. Like all obsessions, it demanded expression. To become a writer was to transform oneself from a reader of character, gazing at those around her with avid, gleaming eyes, to a creator of character, turning her observations into words, conjectures, fantasies. In life as in literature, she bathed ordinary people in the glow of her generous, affectionate imagination; remained attentive to the shadows and shades of their personalities. She did not seek to understand people completely, to master them. She knew all too well the disordered currents of emotion that ate away at the smooth and steady tracts of the mind, that no one, no matter how charming or successful or self-possessed, ever existed as a complete and wholly integrated self.

Suppose, then, that there was something supremely appropriate in my friend and I coming to Mrs. Dalloway in the dark, too ignorant to grasp its characters’ relations fully, but capable of perceiving, with a sudden clap of recognition, that the possibilities and frustrations lighting their minds—excitement, defensiveness, fear; the inability to know another person with certainty—were also lighting ours. Suppose Woolf had created them with an eye to dissolving the boundary between fiction and life, revealing to us that the patterns of thought and feeling arranged by the novel were already embedded in the trivial occurrences of our daily lives (though they may not have seemed trivial to us at the time). This was the explanation that Erich Auerbach ventured as to why Woolf’s writing overflowed with such “good and genuine love but also, in its feminine way, with irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt in life.” Her characters, for all the particularities of their nationality, their race and their class, offered an admirably collective and unifying vision of humankind. They modeled “nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice,” Auerbach wrote. “To be sure, what happens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in a very personal way the individual who lives in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common”: confusion, undoubtedly, but also the enigmatic beauty that could be dug out of minor, random, half-forgotten events.

Virginia Woolf outdoors holding a walking stick, Cornwall, 1916. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-2, MS Thr 559, [21]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

I do not think that Auerbach is right in referring to this sense of shared life, in all its hope and all its melancholy, as a distinctly feminine way of seeing the world. But I do believe that only Woolf’s characters could have shown us the common ground where life and fiction meet: not at fixed points in time and space, but in the recesses of our minds. Had we selected a novel by Flaubert, we might have been mesmerized by the scenes he set, every spoon in every tearoom polished, every grain of sand in the folds of Emma Bovary’s dress discolored and rough. Had we selected a novel by Dickens, we might have flung ourselves into his grand, spirited plots, the action rising, falling, cresting and breaking, then carrying us, along with Pip and Estella, to the end of the book in the most orderly and satisfying manner. Woolf prided herself less on detail and plot than on the creation of characters, who, for all their physical indeterminacy and psychological inconstancy, their worldly insignificance, had minds that felt “real, true, and convincing,” she wrote in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” She burrowed deep into their processes of thought, and, so submerged, illuminated the astonishing perceptions and sensations concealed therein. From them, she extracted not just a stream of consciousness but an unlimited capacity for life—a vitality that could only have been hinted at by the lines of eyes and noses, by little speeches and long silences. One could scarcely imagine stepping into these depths of intimacy with Hemingway’s terse, battered brood. (Though who knows what sort of intimacies my friend had imagined.)

It is perhaps too obvious to insist that Mrs. Dalloway is about a character—for there she is in the title, which Woolf changed from “At Home, or The Party” to “The Hours,” before settling on “Mrs. Dalloway.” (Woolf also considered “The Life of a Lady,” “A Lady,” “A Ladies Portrait,” and “A Lady of Fashion”—titles that alluded to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, arguably the greatest novel of consciousness and character.) But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel that thinks with extraordinary precision and virtuosity about what modern novelists mean when they talk about character: how characters are born; how they age and grow; how they navigate the world of the novel, bumping into the people and the objects that constitute it; how they reach for one another in moments of terror and joy, and, finding nothing solid to hold on to, shrink back, unfurling the dazzling intricacies of their thoughts like the petals of the flowers Clarissa Dalloway sees at the florist’s shop, each burning in solitude, “softly, purely in the misty beds.” The intimacy we are offered with her characters comes at the expense of the intimacy they cannot offer each other. So, in one of my favorite scenes in the novel (I must have asked my friend to attend to it closely), Peter and Clarissa sit in her drawing room, she with her sewing needle, he with his pocket knife, with all the recriminations of the past thirty years hanging between them, walling them off from each other, leaving each no choice but to turn inward, showing the reader, and the reader alone, the memories that still twinge and wound. So Septimus sits in the park, and the light of the sun dancing across the leaves overwhelms him—a feeling he can express to Lucrezia only in frightening, nonsensical murmur. But to the reader he offers an ode to truth and beauty.

Many years after my first reading, the great pleasure of annotating Mrs. Dalloway has been to follow the thread of character-reading through the novel, trying to impress its importance not on one or two readers in the past, but on many in the present. Looking beyond Peter and Clarissa, looking beyond the text to the history of its creation, we discover that the thread never slackens or snaps. We find it wound tightly around the novel’s origins: Woolf’s decision to turn Clarissa Dalloway, a minor character in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), into the main character of her story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923)—and then, discovering that Clarissa clamored for more life, Woolf’s slow and almost unwilling surrender to the novel. We find it stitched through her largest revision to the story: the creation of Septimus as Clarissa’s double, so as to entwine the story of an aging, wealthy, vivacious woman with this story of the First World War and its deadly consequences. Her most famous diary entry about Mrs. Dalloway presents her two characters as representing the metaphysical and political extremes that most intrigued her: “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.” Yet as soon as she voiced this, she retracted it. “But here I may be posing,” she wrote. There is no doubt her characters are shot with history: that, as Alex Zwerdling observes, Woolf used her fiction to contemplate the death throes of the British Empire and to satirize its “hierarchies of class and sex, its complacency, its moral obtuseness.” But the greatness of her novel comes from its refusal “to judge simply and divide the world into heroes and villains.” Her characters remain irreducibly, unconventionally themselves, which means they remain eternally available to show us “the life of feeling in every human being.”

The place to pick up the thread of character-reading is where Woolf tells us it originates: in life, with the early adventures and experiments that compelled her to attend to her family and friends with the same concentrated gaze she turned on the novels she read, and later, the novels she wrote. She mined her life for her fiction, though not in any obvious way. What she sought was not the crude, tangled stuff of gossip. She was after “the slipperiness of the soul.” She wanted the novels to heave with deep, conflicted emotion, with love and with hate; with longing, irritation, regret, relief, madness, and the wonder of being alive to experience it all. At the same time, she believed the writer should absent herself, her person, from the scene of representation. “I think writing must be formal,” she wrote in her diary while editing Mrs. Dalloway in the winter of 1924. “If one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistical: personal, which I detest.” Yet she did not see how, if she were to play the hostess, she could avoid revealing some of herself, the idiosyncratic bent of her imagination. “The irregular fire must be there; & perhaps to loose it, one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that,” she wrote. In creating her characters, she let her readers peep at her character, with all its passions and contradictions.

III.

EVEN A HASTY GLANCE at the life of Adeline Virginia Stephen will reveal that her beginning was irregular, at once enchanted and turbulent. Born on January 25, 1882, she was the second daughter to alight upon the union of Leslie Stephen, a historian and biographer, and Julia Duckworth, a woman far too charming, according to family friend Henry James, to have become “the receptacle” of Leslie Stephen’s “ineffable and impossible taciturnity and dreariness.” Both of Virginia’s parents had been married and widowed once before. Both had brought older children with them to their new marriage. With Leslie came a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen; with Julia, two sons, George and Gerald Duckworth, and a daughter, Stella. To these four, Leslie and Julia added Vanessa in 1879, Thoby in 1880, Virginia in 1882, and Adrian in 1883. They grew their family mostly through carelessness and good fortune, at a time when violent coughs and raging fevers frequently cut short the lives of young children—and so, when they finished, judged themselves lucky not to have “lost” any of theirs along the way.

Julia Duckworth Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen sitting on a couch reading; Virginia Woolf sitting behind the arm of the couch looking at her parents, Talland House, St Ives (Cornwall), 1893. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-3, MS Thr 560, [2]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

In a family cluttered with children, “Little ’Ginia” stood out from the start, a baby with red hair and large green eyes. She was an apprehensive character; intensely responsive and quick to anger; always pleading nervousness or fear; and refusing to submit to her parents’ caresses, unless to get her way. Her knack for telling stories was apparent early on, in the letter she wrote to her mother at age five or six “about an old man of 70 who got his legs caute in the weels of the train”; in the tale she told her father before bed, “a long rigmarole about a crow and a book.” She could be comical, eccentric even. Her family nicknamed her “the Goat” for her bleating little laugh and accident-proneness. Photographs from her childhood show a small round girl with a high forehead and heavy eyes. Later, they depict an adolescent with a moody jaw and large thin ears. Hers was a face that needed time to grow into the supercilious elegance many would come to associate with it.

Top row, from left to right: Leslie Stephen, Lady Albutt, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Next to Gerald Duckworth is Sir Clifford Albutt. Bottom row, from left to right: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Adrian Stephen. St Ives (Cornwall), 1892. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-5, MS Thr 562, [5]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Hayle from Lelant, Cornwall, Alfred East. Oil on panel, 1891–92. (Birmingham Museums Trust)

Virginia’s winters were spent in the darkness and chill of London, at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. Summers were passed at Talland House, Leslie Stephen’s “pocket-paradise” in Cornwall—a large, shabby, stucco house, with disorderly gardens that sloped to the shore and iron-railed balconies that overlooked, first, St Ives Bay, and then, if one were to raise one’s eyes to the horizon, the Celtic Sea. (The sound of the waves breaking, their powerful, rhythmic indifference to the human beings standing on the shore—Woolf would recall this scene and its sensations in all her novels.) For the Stephen children, as for Clarissa Dalloway, summer was a season of intense happiness. Carriage rides, moth hunts, fireworks, games of cricket, billiards and charades, swimming and boating competitions, putting on plays—all their joy and amusement was recorded in “The Hyde Park Gate News,” the newspaper Virginia and Vanessa wrote and circulated to their neighbors. By the time Virginia was ten, she, Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian had banded together as the family’s “Explorers and revolutionists,” casting off their half-siblings as the “consenting and approving Victorians.”

Facade of Talland House, St Ives (Cornwall), undated. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-5, MS Thr 562, [1d]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

From an early age, “the Victorian” would signify all that was dull, antiquated, and prim to her, in life as well as in the literature. Her half-siblings often appeared to her not as full-fleshed characters but as types—the musty and predictable figures one would find throughout all her fiction, and especially in Mrs. Dalloway. There was unctuous Gerald and loathsome, ignorant George, who, when Virginia turned seventeen, would start slipping into her room at night to fondle her. (One can see the two of them peeping out from behind “the admirable” Hugh Whitbread, Clarissa Dalloway’s pompous, sexually abusive friend.) There was kind, dreamy Stella, whom one often found sitting in a corner, her golden head bent over her white dresses and doilies; and who, like Clarissa’s sister Sylvia, would die young and tragically. There was Laura—a “little wretch,” according to Leslie Stephen; “backward” and “wicked” and prone to “dreadful fits of passion.” Cherished at first, she was afflicted by an unidentified mental illness and institutionalized when Virginia was eleven. When she created Septimus Smith nearly thirty years later, she insisted that, for all his delusions, he was no “degenerate.” She had more sympathy for him than for her half-sister, the squealing, stammering, “vacant-eyed girl” she recalled in her memoirs.

Of all her siblings, it was Vanessa whom Virginia loved best. It was “Nessa” who took care of her—who bathed her and rubbed her back with scents to calm her nerves, and put her to bed in clean sheets; who guarded her, amused her, and encouraged her to read and to write. Their mother was often away, nursing sick and dying family members, or too unwell herself to rise from bed. Their father, a self-absorbed and resolutely tortured figure, spent most of his time fretting over work and money. Though Leslie read aloud to Virginia in the evenings, selecting his favorite passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, and Austen, the exact shape and substance of his daughters’ intellectual development was left to them to decide. The boys had their public schools, then Cambridge. Vanessa, who would become a painter and interior designer, took it upon herself to enroll in art classes at Sir Arthur Cope’s Art School. Virginia’s education was more haphazard: some courses in Greek and history at King’s College, private Latin lessons with Clara Pater, the sister of the English essayist Walter Pater. Despite her schooling, and despite her family’s “very communicative, literate, letter writing” life, Virginia sometimes presented herself as appallingly uneducated, ignorant even. All her life, she claimed, she was nothing more than “a common reader”—the title she would give to the essay collection she drafted while writing Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as young girls with cricket bat and ball at St Ives (Cornwall), c. 1893–94. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photographs, MS Thr 564, [50]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Still, it is true that most of the knowledge Virginia gleaned during her childhood came from the books she squirreled from her father’s library. She turned their pages with a discipline so fierce, so relentless, that it concerned Leslie just as much as it astonished him. It was not unusual for her to read three or four books at once, “gobbling” her “beloved Macaulay,” Lamb, Pepys, and Montaigne, savoring the novels of the Brontë sisters, Eliot, and Trollope as the purest and deepest pleasure she could imagine. If her autodidacticism had the effect of making her violently single-minded and contemptuous of authority—particularly when disguised as male benevolence or reason—then it also endowed her with a sense of intellectual self-sufficiency. She arrived in adolescence convinced that the curiosity that burned in her mind, the loving particularity of her imagination, would light her queer, crooked path through the world.

She was thirteen when, on May 5, 1895, her mother died of influenza. Some twenty-nine years later, while writing Mrs. Dalloway, she recalled Julia’s death in her diary: “I think it happened early on a Sunday morning, & I looked out of the nursery window & saw old Dr Seton walking away with his hands behind his back, as if to say It is finished, & then the doves descending, to peck in the road, I suppose, with a fall & descent of infinite peace.” After Julia’s death, the remaining members of the Stephen family plunged into a period of oppressive mourning that stretched for nine unhappy years, from 1895 to 1904. Leslie turned theatrical. He took to wandering the house with his arms outstretched, proclaiming his undying love for Julia and demanding that his daughters care for him with the same selflessness their mother had shown. Embarrassed by their father’s emotional excesses, the Stephen children learned to smother their own feelings of grief. Her mother’s last words to her—“Hold yourself straight, little Goat”—lodged deep into Virginia’s being, as did her fear of both sentimentality and stoicism. Shrinking from her father and her siblings, she never spoke of Julia if she could help it. “Used to sit up in my room raging—at father, at George. And read and read and read,” she would later recall. She read to console and to distract herself. Books, she wrote, were “a mercy.”

Virginia Woolf and Sir Leslie Stephen. (Virginia Woolf Monk’s House photograph album, MH-1, MS Thr 557, [180]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

Virginia never stopped reading—not when Stella died in 1897 during an operation; nor when Leslie was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 1902; nor in the two excruciating years it took him to die. After his death, she set her books aside and had her first breakdown in the spring of 1904. “All that summer she was mad,” her nephew Quentin Bell later recalled, in his infamous, bitterly contested account of her illness. Refusing food, refusing sleep, she started to hear voices. A chorus of birds chirped in Greek outside her bedroom window. (Twenty years later, the sparrows in Regent’s Park would “sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words” to Septimus Smith.) She answered them in a thick stream of gibberish that frightened her siblings. The doctors who came exasperated her. She responded to their orders—sleep, rest, isolation from those she loved—with threats, behaving viciously toward her nurses. When she tried to commit suicide for the first time, she threw herself from a first-story window. Unlike “the large Bloomsbury lodging-house window” from which Septimus would plummet in Mrs. Dalloway, her window was too low for the fall to cause any lasting injuries.

“All the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild things have gone—and Nessa says they were always only my imagination,” Virginia wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson in September of 1904. By the autumn, when she had recovered enough to read and write again, it was in Bloomsbury, in the house her siblings had rented in Gordon Square after leaving their family home in Kensington. Orphaned, they adopted a new group of friends—the earnest, witty, liberated young men who had been at Cambridge with Thoby and now found themselves drawn to the Stephen family’s “odd new Bloomsbury life.” Outside the house were the great squares of London with their rows of pale, lamp-lit trees; Regent’s Park and the London Zoo; and an old blind woman who had claimed a narrow strip of Oxford Street and stooped there all day long, singing above the sound of the omnibuses coming and going. (All this Woolf would memorialize in Mrs. Dalloway’s London.) Inside, on Thursday and Friday evenings, one could find an equally spirited gathering of painters, critics, novelists, aspiring politicians, and economists; for there, scattered about the sitting room, were Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and, before he left for Ceylon to do the bidding of the British Empire, Leonard Woolf. Virginia referred to them simply as her “group.”

Oxford Circus, c. 1920. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)

Piccadilly Circus, Jacques-Emile Blanche. Oil on panel, c. 1900. (York Art Gallery)

Both Virginia’s admirers and her detractors would come to call her circle of friends “the Bloomsbury group.” Over time, the freedom and creativity associated with Bloomsbury—its postimpressionist art, its socialist politics, its sexual liberties—would assume unreal proportions, eclipsing the very real tensions within it. Many have wondered what it must have been like for Virginia, to be one of the few women in the sitting room at Gordon Square, the only person who had neither attended Cambridge nor slept with anyone who had. Certainly, she admired the spontaneity of the group’s talk, the burst of activity they brought to her life after years of grief had left her feeling raw and inert. But she also scorned these young men, whose chatter only skimmed the surface of life, who aped intelligence instead of embracing it fully, she felt. At times they struck her as perfect specimens of “the public school type”: the term she used to describe a man whose path through life—a bedroom at Eton, a study at Oxford or Cambridge, a place in London society—betrayed an entitlement she found despicable. “No country but England could have produced him,” proclaims Sally Seton, Clarissa Dalloway’s girlhood friend and lover, of “the public school type.” For Virginia, the roar and splendor of Bloomsbury concealed the social circumstances that made its genius, an overwhelmingly male genius, possible.

She returned to writing at twenty-three, partly out of pride, but mostly out of wonder at the struggles of modern fiction, working as a book critic for the Guardian, the National Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, eager to testify “to the great fun & pleasure my habit of reading has given me.” She started to journey around the countryside, learning to train her eye on every stray sign of life, like a spaniel flushing the fields. In Norfolk, she threaded together impressions of “thatched cottages—sign posts—tiny villages—great waggons heaped with corn—sagacious dogs, farmers’ carts.” Peering down the white bluffs of Cornwall, she wondered why the sea seemed to her, as it did to so many others, “a symbol of their mother England.” England intrigued her, with its strange, ancient, romantic ruins and faraway outposts in mysterious lands; its rigid, stony-hearted royals and its dingy, disagreeable servants. (“The fact is the lower classes aredetestable,” Woolf would write in her diary in 1920—a prejudice she harbored and took great care to ironize in Mrs. Dalloway.) Her fascination with the nation’s character would shape all her work, tinging her portraits of the English with nostalgia and contempt, satire and snobbery. In 1905, she made her first attempt at novel writing with Melymbrosia, later published as The Voyage Out, and containing her earliest sketch of Clarissa and Richard Dalloway.

Plowing in Norfolk, c. 1900. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)

The harbor at St Ives, c. 1920. (UK Photo and Social History Archive)

In her newfound state of happiness, Virginia was not prepared to lose two siblings almost at once: first Thoby, who died late in 1906, after contracting typhoid during a family holiday to Greece; then, in 1907, Vanessa, to marriage, to Clive Bell and their artistic union. The siblings who remained, Virginia and Adrian, moved to a house in Fitzroy Square and lived together for two uneasy years. Theirs was an unhappy relationship: Adrian found that his older sister was fussier and more demanding than he had anticipated. She judged him unambitious, lachrymose. In 1909, incapable of tolerating each other’s company any longer, ...