'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself...'

A CLOSE LOOK at the first page, and we're away!

Hello friends!

Today we begin reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Huzzah!

If you’re new to Woolf or have found her writing challenging in the past, you might like to check out this primer first, in which I give a few pointers on how to approach her writing.

In this post: reading group HOUSEKEEPING, a brief SUMMARY of the first page and a CLOSE LOOK at the first page.

A bit of housekeeping before we start

Our (very simple) reading schedule is here. The aim is to read and finish Mrs Dalloway during June. After today, please continue reading and aim to have finished the first twenty-five pages by 7 JUNE.

Honestly, I’m figuring things out as I go, but my thinking is that while we read Mrs Dalloway I’ll be posting one of three things:

• CLOSE LOOK - A close look at a limited amount of text (a single page or paragraph or short scene).

• SUMMARY - A snapshot of what we’ve just read so you can check your understanding or remind yourself of where we’ve got to.

• THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS - My own (insightful, perceptive… (*consults thesaurus) germane) analysis of what we’ve read.

I’ll note the post type in the subheading so you know what you’re getting.

Now, without further ado but with further adieus to those not climbing aboard the good ship Dalloway, let’s begin.

Summary of the first page

Mrs Dalloway (D) is off to buy flowers. Her house is busy with activity (preparations for a party that evening, though the reader doesn’t know about the party yet). She leaves her house and waits on the kerb to cross the road. While this happens, she reminisces about the house she grew up in, being eighteen (she is now in her fifties) and a man called Peter Walsh whom she knew then and who is due to return from India any day now. Her neighbour sees her waiting to cross the road. He observes that D has ‘grown very white since her illness.’ (This takes me a little into page 2 in my edition.)

Digging a little deeper

A removal of doors

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

Something out of the ordinary is happening – the servant, Lucy, is busier than usual and people are coming to take the doors off their hinges. There might be a wider metaphor at play here concerning the removal of doors – in this novel, ordinary barriers and boundaries will be effaced. Boundaries between past and present will disappear as characters pass seamlessly between memory and the present-day – often within a single moment. Other liminal spaces will also be explored and transgressed – between the individual and the crowd, between sanity and insanity, between life and death, between this mind and that one.

Memories of youth and Bourton

In the next paragraph, there is a call-back to ‘hinges.’ D remembers the sound they made at her family’s home at Bourton as she opened the French windows and went outside. D is, in this paragraph, lost in a memory about Bourton, of being eighteen, of Peter Walsh whom she knew then. We have the first of the very long sentences we will encounter again and again in the novel. (This one clocks in at 99 words.)

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; 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; 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?’ – was that it? – ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’ – was that it?

The sentence tumbles forth – beginning with a memory of a similarly fresh morning at Bourton, of standing at the windows, of the flowers and trees outside with ‘the smoke winding off them,’ of an ominous feeling, of Peter Walsh making some quip. The memory is marked by stillness – the air is still and calm, D is physically still – in fact, twice in this single sentence she is standing and twice she is looking. This contrasts with the preceding sentence in which D recalls how she ‘burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.’ Look for these contrasts as you read – Woolf is expert at placing vividly different items next to one another and, in so doing, creating interesting points of consonance and strange moments of acuity as the one throws something unusual forward in the other. Here we have movement and stillness. The words ‘rising, falling; standing’ all appear in a row. In a landscape of smoke and trees and rooks where everything is lofty and skyward, suddenly we are down among the vegetables.

One might expect the pace to slow down considerably here with such a long sentence, but the sentence’s short cadence keeps the pace fast – it is broken into small fragments by commas and semi-colons which allow impressions to pile on top of each other in a teetering heap as we wait for the sentence to resolve. These heaped images imitate flights of memory; thought-chains with their own intuitive logic particular to the individual.

Peter Walsh and cabbages

D recalls that Peter Walsh will be returning from India soon. His letters are dull. (Later, she will refer to them, rather beautifully, as ‘dry sticks.’) She is amused to think that – of all the many things she should be able to remember about him – what comes to mind is a remark about cabbages.

But D hasn’t got very far…

After memories of Bourton and Peter Walsh, we land back in the present – D ‘stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass.’ Woolf creates a lovely effect here. It suddenly becomes clear that, despite the vast leaps and flourishes occurring in D’s mind, D has done nothing more than leave the house and now waits to cross the road. Not only that, D is reserved and stiff as she waits. The vivid and playful flight of D’s thoughts is utterly hidden. We are each of us blind to this torrent in others – just as D’s neighbour, Scrope Purvis, is when he sees D ‘perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.’

Seamless transfer into another mind

Indeed, it’s rather a shock to move momentarily into Scrope Purvis’s perspective; to find ourselves observing D in the third person after having been so ensconced in her mind. This is the first indication we have that we will perhaps not spend all our time with D.

Concreteness amidst the ephemeral

A final thing I want to point out is how very concrete Woolf’s writing is. She is describing thinking, an inner run of thoughts – which might otherwise have been vague, abstract, non-specific, ethereal, emotion-heavy – and yet the writing is clogged with things. In the first page we encounter: flowers, doors, hinges, men, morning, children, a beach, a little squeak, French windows, open air, a flap of a wave, a kiss of a wave, a girl of eighteen, trees, smoke, rooks, vegetables, cauliflowers, breakfast, the terrace, India, June or July, letters, his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, cabbages…

This is something I love about Woolf’s writing. She is adept at describing ephemeral states of mind concretely and cramming in all the stuff of life until you have a sort of poetry of beaches and hinges and cauliflowers.

Over to you

This is me nudging your canoe into the rapids – please carry on reading! And, if you like, share your own thoughts and impressions about the first page below. Don’t be shy – all comments are welcome. If there was a sentence or sentence fragment you liked or found interesting – please share it. Or if you’d like to contribute a treatise on representations of cabbages in modernist literature, that’s also welcome. BUT! It’s also very fine to just read-along without participating in the comments – I’m so happy to have you join me!

See you on 7^th June when we will discuss the first twenty-five pages!