I'm so happy to have found your substack (thanks, mary g!). I just reread Mrs. D for the XX time (can't really count). Always in the spring. What struck me this go-round was a point you made: Woolf created so many seamless transitions from one mind to another. I read and reread lots of sections trying to figure out how she did it. I might be a little too simple, but I think she ... just did it and relied on the reader to notice and make the transition with her. One other thing in your rundown: names of here-and-gone characters. Rumplemayers, Durtnall, SCROPE PURVIS!!!!! Fabulous.
Yes, the narrative voice does these wonderful peregrinations over London and in and out of different characters' heads. Woolf takes full advantage of the possibilities of the form.
I think it might be something about the definitive nature of the names and the here-and-gone (that’s cool!) aspect of the characters (the van…the people) that is so fabulous (cool again, man). It sticks their reality in our minds. I mean, I’ve now got a whole world the Rumplemayer emporium and its vans. Woolf really keeps this going in the rest of the pages we’re all reading this week; sometimes with a lot more interiority and sometimes less, but always transferring so seamlessly (as you say).
I’m intrigued by your suggestion that you might be a little too simple…I really think that simplicity here is a real virtue. Nothing is as big a turn-off as someone grandstanding their huge enormous brains and their knowledge worn as heavily as if it were bombazine; seems to me, that reading and thinking about Clarissa/Mrs. D/Woolf/all the here-and-gone with simplicity actually really adds to our reading life. It’s a bit like a balm in a world of overthinking. And, then after a bit of it, we’re kind of just there with Woolf as we go across all these London places like the aeroplane (but, hey, the aeroplane is for next week…we’re still just poised on that Victoria Street kerb: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’
Ah, yes, To the Lighthouse is actually my ur text, that book you keep going back to throughout your lifetime. It was the centerpiece of my master's thesis as I had immersed myself in all things Woolfian for over 3 years before beginning to write it. All her diaries, as much criticism as I could find, novels, essays, short stories, and DiSalvo's analysis of her early upbringing, etc. But oh, Mrs. Ramsay, constantly navigating between Mr. Ramsay's blundering and her own power. What a masterpiece of reflection of Woolf's own family dynamics. But I digress!
I love how you highlighted how women's writing is generally and historically marginalized in favor of battle scenes, war scenes, violence and narratives of power plays (master/slave relationships), while what Woolf does is pan in mercilessly on the dynamics of the family under patriarchal rule, and how women locate ways of surviving, of nurturing their identities. Great stuff, Tash!
I'm just so thrilled to be part of this amazing group and process of engaging in Mrs. Dalloway anew.
Thrilled to have you Nancy! Sounds like you have an enormous depth of knowledge to draw on - look very forward to your thoughts as we work through the book.
And…very briefly…a couple of things: the name of the neighbour Scrope Purvis is like a little hook, such an unusual name Scrope.
And, the other thing which I love is the naming of Westminster as the actual place where this is happening. I think it does a lot…it acts as a physical, geographical counterpoint to Mrs D’s mind, and if you know the area (even all these years after she wrote it) you can’t help but see it in your mind’s eye, and then at this moment place Mrs D and Scrope actually on the curb waiting for the Durtnall’s van to pass.
Yes, I was wondering whether anyone would comment on the weirdness of that name! I tried to chase up what it meant or might be referencing but got nowhere! Interesting to think of it as a little hook.
Lord Scrope of Masham. Appears as 'Scroop' in Shakespeare's Richard II and another one, a descendant I guess, in Henry V. In each case a devious politician. Relevant? Maybe.
So true - place offers a lovely anchor and counterpoint - great word - exactly. There are many moments when the prose is galloping along in D's mind and she will interrupt the flow of thoughts to cross a particular road and you can figure out whereabouts D is in the real city of London. You can see it, as you say. It makes the reading experience very vivid.
There is a lovely interweaving of memory and thought with place. Yet place has a different quality. If the prose were a tapestry, place would be more textured or something.
I think VW chose “Scrope’ for two reasons: first, for its inherent silliness, and second, because it’s shorthand for poshness. Scrope is an aristocratic name—I don’t carry such stuff around in my head, but I do look it up at thepeerage.com. Suffice it to say that in the fairly distant past the Scropes were Lords of Bolton and a Scrope (perhaps related) became the first Earl of Sunderland. Living in Westminster doesn’t necessarily mean you’re posh, even if you have servants, as Mrs D evidently does, but if you have neighbours called Scrope Purvis, you pretty definitely are. That’s my story, anyway.
I wonder if VW's contemporaries would have found the name odd. From this distance, temporal and cultural, it seems so 'terribly' English. But if it was only a name to signify social status, might we be finding it too weird for its purpose, giving it more status than it warrants? Interesting dilemma when reading across years and continents.
Oh, I think “Scrope” sounded as funny in the 1920s as it does now. I could imagine Dickens, 75 years earlier, having a character named Scrope because it sounded silly.
It’s interesting how we do that. We could keep the geography in our reading, just keep it in the book, using the author’s words and imagery to guide us. But, so often when the geography is real, we elaborate our reading by using maps in this way. I think it’s creative, a way of layering our reading, of taking ourselves to the book.
I loved your primer, Tash, because it's succinct, relevant, and provides a cool foundation for anyone not familiar with Woolf's work. One thing I love about this novel, and it's been so long since I read it so I value the opportunity to move through it again, is that Woolf valorizes the feminine. That is, a lot of novels by men are written about war or violent themes -- Woolf takes the quotidian elements of life, the dinner party, the planning, the flowers, the food, the guest list -- and elevates it to the status of warfare, elevates it to the same type of status masculine novels attain. She takes the dinner party, which I always thought was a metaphor for life itself, and interjects death into it ala Septimus (am I spoiling the plot? Apologies, but I wanted to give a kind of overview of the purpose of this novel), a horror that Clarissa is unable to assimilate. Yet this intersection of life and death happens all the time, all around us.
The one beautiful thing about her style too is that she seamlessly pivots from one realm of consciousness to another, which was one of the reasons we identified her as one of the first modernists....and this pivoting occurs or intersects in a single moment, when two or more people are looking at a clock, and that clock then becomes the pivot point. It's like watching a ballet dancer at times. Apologies if I've gone too far in this first response. Cannot wait to hear others' responses to this gorgeous little gem of a novel, especially if they haven't read it before.
No apologies necessary - great comment! I agree with all of it. Yes, your point about valorising the feminine makes me think of Mrs Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse' - her skills in 'marshalling the troops' during her dinner party are as skillful as any general in battle. It's like watching a conductor conducting a symphony. To your point, VW writing in 'A Room of One's Own':
'And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial."
And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.'
And yes, your point about pivot points is bang on. I'm going to talk about that further in the next post - moments when individual consciousnesses are brought together by a tolling clock, or a plane sky-writing overhead.
Yes, and isn't it just brilliant when she does this to us as readers? Here we are, noticing that clock, or that plane, and suddenly you are inside someone else's head. But the plane, such a metaphor itself that might represent transcendence, or assuming a panoramic view of life, is the point of attention, and everyone is having a different experience of it. It's as though she is slicing a piece of life like a pie, offering it up to us for our consideration, asking us to acknowledge that this too, this one piece, is also life, is also representative of the whole of life.
Two things stood out for me on this first page. The first is at the end of the second paragraph: “...fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” I find the phrase very vivid and pleasing—but I don’t understand what it actually means. I can’t think of anything that is issued to children on a beach. Any ideas? Am I missing the obvious?
My second is a thought rather than a query. D is thinking about Peter Walsh, who “would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull.”. This made me think of when VW (then Miss Stephen) was waiting for Leonard Woolf to be back from Ceylon, in 1912, ten years almost expertly before she began writing what became this novel. Iirc he went to live at Gordon Square with Virginia and Vanessa, et al, but I don’t know whether that was pre-arranged. Anyway, she was defo aware that he was coming and she was at least mildly interested in him. He had been away for six years. I’m not suggesting that Walsh is based on LW, just that VW knew something about waiting for people to come back from the further reaches of the Empire.
Interesting! I hadn't made that connection with Leonard and the waiting of someone to return from the far reaches of the Empire. Julia Briggs (VW biographer) also points out a connection with one of VW's cousins who had retired from the Indian Civil Service at around the time VW was writing (and who, tellingly, owned a large pocketknife!).
Regarding the children on the beach - I read this as an image of joy and purity. It's a morning so fresh and lovely that the Gods / universe would reserve such a display for 'children on a beach.' It's an interesting choice of word though - 'issued'.
"... an interesting choice of word though - 'issued'." I agree, and--apologies for being late to the party--I tend to see it as an example of the lingering effects of the Great War, perhaps even a certain militarizing of the routines of everyday life. After all, in the army soldiers are referred to as having been issued rations, ammunition, weapons, and so on; issued is the commonly used verb to cover such situations. You also hear the description "Army issue uniform" or "Army issue rifle"--you can check out these usages online.
So there seems nothing unusual about Mrs. Dalloway having the fleeting image in her mind of children on a beach lining up and being called to attention, dressing ranks, and then standing at ease while they each receive their Government authorized "Children's Issue Fresh Sunny Day".
A good book to read on this topic is "The Great War and Modern Memory" by Paul Fussell.
I wouldn't bet money on this, but drifting off to sleep last night it occurred to me that VW might have been playing with the word "Issue", using it as a verb but also implying its meaning as a noun. We don't hear it much in everyday use, but in genealogical circles one sometimes refers to one's children as one's issue, as in the description of a marriage without issue or someone dying without issue. So, these imaginary children on Mrs. D's imaginary beach would have to be somebodies' issue, to whom is being issued a fresh, sunny day!
I took "issued" as a child feeling a really good beach day not as something that just happens (as an adult would) but as something issued a bit like a library book, say.
Rumplemeyer is the true name of a London-Paris pair of very upmarket tea and pastry / luncheon restaurants, and , it seems caterers. The Paris Rumplemeyers is presently known as Angelina’s and is still on the head of the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries.
Which is not to disparage the Rumpelmayers and Scrope Purvises of the book! I really loved the use of those names - a lot can be communicated by a good choice of name! 'Dalloway' for example, has a very satisfying lilt to it somehow.
I'm so happy to have found your substack (thanks, mary g!). I just reread Mrs. D for the XX time (can't really count). Always in the spring. What struck me this go-round was a point you made: Woolf created so many seamless transitions from one mind to another. I read and reread lots of sections trying to figure out how she did it. I might be a little too simple, but I think she ... just did it and relied on the reader to notice and make the transition with her. One other thing in your rundown: names of here-and-gone characters. Rumplemayers, Durtnall, SCROPE PURVIS!!!!! Fabulous.
Yes, the narrative voice does these wonderful peregrinations over London and in and out of different characters' heads. Woolf takes full advantage of the possibilities of the form.
I think it might be something about the definitive nature of the names and the here-and-gone (that’s cool!) aspect of the characters (the van…the people) that is so fabulous (cool again, man). It sticks their reality in our minds. I mean, I’ve now got a whole world the Rumplemayer emporium and its vans. Woolf really keeps this going in the rest of the pages we’re all reading this week; sometimes with a lot more interiority and sometimes less, but always transferring so seamlessly (as you say).
I’m intrigued by your suggestion that you might be a little too simple…I really think that simplicity here is a real virtue. Nothing is as big a turn-off as someone grandstanding their huge enormous brains and their knowledge worn as heavily as if it were bombazine; seems to me, that reading and thinking about Clarissa/Mrs. D/Woolf/all the here-and-gone with simplicity actually really adds to our reading life. It’s a bit like a balm in a world of overthinking. And, then after a bit of it, we’re kind of just there with Woolf as we go across all these London places like the aeroplane (but, hey, the aeroplane is for next week…we’re still just poised on that Victoria Street kerb: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’
Plunge became one of my favorite words the first time I read Mrs. D.. Whenever i see it i think of Clarissa.
I see after writing that others have pulled out the names as well. Details are so meaningful!
Ah, yes, To the Lighthouse is actually my ur text, that book you keep going back to throughout your lifetime. It was the centerpiece of my master's thesis as I had immersed myself in all things Woolfian for over 3 years before beginning to write it. All her diaries, as much criticism as I could find, novels, essays, short stories, and DiSalvo's analysis of her early upbringing, etc. But oh, Mrs. Ramsay, constantly navigating between Mr. Ramsay's blundering and her own power. What a masterpiece of reflection of Woolf's own family dynamics. But I digress!
I love how you highlighted how women's writing is generally and historically marginalized in favor of battle scenes, war scenes, violence and narratives of power plays (master/slave relationships), while what Woolf does is pan in mercilessly on the dynamics of the family under patriarchal rule, and how women locate ways of surviving, of nurturing their identities. Great stuff, Tash!
I'm just so thrilled to be part of this amazing group and process of engaging in Mrs. Dalloway anew.
It IS a masterpiece.
Thrilled to have you Nancy! Sounds like you have an enormous depth of knowledge to draw on - look very forward to your thoughts as we work through the book.
And…very briefly…a couple of things: the name of the neighbour Scrope Purvis is like a little hook, such an unusual name Scrope.
And, the other thing which I love is the naming of Westminster as the actual place where this is happening. I think it does a lot…it acts as a physical, geographical counterpoint to Mrs D’s mind, and if you know the area (even all these years after she wrote it) you can’t help but see it in your mind’s eye, and then at this moment place Mrs D and Scrope actually on the curb waiting for the Durtnall’s van to pass.
Yes, I was wondering whether anyone would comment on the weirdness of that name! I tried to chase up what it meant or might be referencing but got nowhere! Interesting to think of it as a little hook.
Lord Scrope of Masham. Appears as 'Scroop' in Shakespeare's Richard II and another one, a descendant I guess, in Henry V. In each case a devious politician. Relevant? Maybe.
Cheers for that.
So true - place offers a lovely anchor and counterpoint - great word - exactly. There are many moments when the prose is galloping along in D's mind and she will interrupt the flow of thoughts to cross a particular road and you can figure out whereabouts D is in the real city of London. You can see it, as you say. It makes the reading experience very vivid.
There is a lovely interweaving of memory and thought with place. Yet place has a different quality. If the prose were a tapestry, place would be more textured or something.
I think VW chose “Scrope’ for two reasons: first, for its inherent silliness, and second, because it’s shorthand for poshness. Scrope is an aristocratic name—I don’t carry such stuff around in my head, but I do look it up at thepeerage.com. Suffice it to say that in the fairly distant past the Scropes were Lords of Bolton and a Scrope (perhaps related) became the first Earl of Sunderland. Living in Westminster doesn’t necessarily mean you’re posh, even if you have servants, as Mrs D evidently does, but if you have neighbours called Scrope Purvis, you pretty definitely are. That’s my story, anyway.
I wonder if VW's contemporaries would have found the name odd. From this distance, temporal and cultural, it seems so 'terribly' English. But if it was only a name to signify social status, might we be finding it too weird for its purpose, giving it more status than it warrants? Interesting dilemma when reading across years and continents.
Great point.
Oh, I think “Scrope” sounded as funny in the 1920s as it does now. I could imagine Dickens, 75 years earlier, having a character named Scrope because it sounded silly.
Ah interesting - thank you Susan!
Thank you re Scrope (as per @Ronald Turnbull above)
I've pulled out google maps and traced her walk just to see the distance, the surroundings. Not being familiar with London it was helpful.
It’s interesting how we do that. We could keep the geography in our reading, just keep it in the book, using the author’s words and imagery to guide us. But, so often when the geography is real, we elaborate our reading by using maps in this way. I think it’s creative, a way of layering our reading, of taking ourselves to the book.
I loved your primer, Tash, because it's succinct, relevant, and provides a cool foundation for anyone not familiar with Woolf's work. One thing I love about this novel, and it's been so long since I read it so I value the opportunity to move through it again, is that Woolf valorizes the feminine. That is, a lot of novels by men are written about war or violent themes -- Woolf takes the quotidian elements of life, the dinner party, the planning, the flowers, the food, the guest list -- and elevates it to the status of warfare, elevates it to the same type of status masculine novels attain. She takes the dinner party, which I always thought was a metaphor for life itself, and interjects death into it ala Septimus (am I spoiling the plot? Apologies, but I wanted to give a kind of overview of the purpose of this novel), a horror that Clarissa is unable to assimilate. Yet this intersection of life and death happens all the time, all around us.
The one beautiful thing about her style too is that she seamlessly pivots from one realm of consciousness to another, which was one of the reasons we identified her as one of the first modernists....and this pivoting occurs or intersects in a single moment, when two or more people are looking at a clock, and that clock then becomes the pivot point. It's like watching a ballet dancer at times. Apologies if I've gone too far in this first response. Cannot wait to hear others' responses to this gorgeous little gem of a novel, especially if they haven't read it before.
No apologies necessary - great comment! I agree with all of it. Yes, your point about valorising the feminine makes me think of Mrs Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse' - her skills in 'marshalling the troops' during her dinner party are as skillful as any general in battle. It's like watching a conductor conducting a symphony. To your point, VW writing in 'A Room of One's Own':
'And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial."
And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.'
(I was having trouble tracking down that quote in my copy of AROO but then remembered that one of our number, Nicole, had helpfully included it in her highlight reel of AROO quotes here: https://theliterarialetter.substack.com/p/she-died-youngalas-she-never-wrote - thanks Nicole!)
And yes, your point about pivot points is bang on. I'm going to talk about that further in the next post - moments when individual consciousnesses are brought together by a tolling clock, or a plane sky-writing overhead.
Yes, and isn't it just brilliant when she does this to us as readers? Here we are, noticing that clock, or that plane, and suddenly you are inside someone else's head. But the plane, such a metaphor itself that might represent transcendence, or assuming a panoramic view of life, is the point of attention, and everyone is having a different experience of it. It's as though she is slicing a piece of life like a pie, offering it up to us for our consideration, asking us to acknowledge that this too, this one piece, is also life, is also representative of the whole of life.
Beautifully put. Exactly.
Not to mention the lunch with Lady B. That's a battlefield with such a formidable general.
Thanks so much for showing me a way in, and lighting up little trails in my brain.
What a plunge! I'm already in love with this book--25 pages in. Looking forward to this month of reading with all of you. Thank you, Tash!
So glad you could join us Mary!
Two things stood out for me on this first page. The first is at the end of the second paragraph: “...fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” I find the phrase very vivid and pleasing—but I don’t understand what it actually means. I can’t think of anything that is issued to children on a beach. Any ideas? Am I missing the obvious?
My second is a thought rather than a query. D is thinking about Peter Walsh, who “would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull.”. This made me think of when VW (then Miss Stephen) was waiting for Leonard Woolf to be back from Ceylon, in 1912, ten years almost expertly before she began writing what became this novel. Iirc he went to live at Gordon Square with Virginia and Vanessa, et al, but I don’t know whether that was pre-arranged. Anyway, she was defo aware that he was coming and she was at least mildly interested in him. He had been away for six years. I’m not suggesting that Walsh is based on LW, just that VW knew something about waiting for people to come back from the further reaches of the Empire.
Interesting! I hadn't made that connection with Leonard and the waiting of someone to return from the far reaches of the Empire. Julia Briggs (VW biographer) also points out a connection with one of VW's cousins who had retired from the Indian Civil Service at around the time VW was writing (and who, tellingly, owned a large pocketknife!).
Regarding the children on the beach - I read this as an image of joy and purity. It's a morning so fresh and lovely that the Gods / universe would reserve such a display for 'children on a beach.' It's an interesting choice of word though - 'issued'.
"... an interesting choice of word though - 'issued'." I agree, and--apologies for being late to the party--I tend to see it as an example of the lingering effects of the Great War, perhaps even a certain militarizing of the routines of everyday life. After all, in the army soldiers are referred to as having been issued rations, ammunition, weapons, and so on; issued is the commonly used verb to cover such situations. You also hear the description "Army issue uniform" or "Army issue rifle"--you can check out these usages online.
So there seems nothing unusual about Mrs. Dalloway having the fleeting image in her mind of children on a beach lining up and being called to attention, dressing ranks, and then standing at ease while they each receive their Government authorized "Children's Issue Fresh Sunny Day".
A good book to read on this topic is "The Great War and Modern Memory" by Paul Fussell.
I wouldn't bet money on this, but drifting off to sleep last night it occurred to me that VW might have been playing with the word "Issue", using it as a verb but also implying its meaning as a noun. We don't hear it much in everyday use, but in genealogical circles one sometimes refers to one's children as one's issue, as in the description of a marriage without issue or someone dying without issue. So, these imaginary children on Mrs. D's imaginary beach would have to be somebodies' issue, to whom is being issued a fresh, sunny day!
I took "issued" as a child feeling a really good beach day not as something that just happens (as an adult would) but as something issued a bit like a library book, say.
I haven’t reread this for a couple of years and you’ve inspired me to pick up Mrs. Dalloway again.
What a wonderful close reading! Thank you.
Rumpelmeyer is a pretty weird name too . Will there be more like these?
Rumplemeyer is the true name of a London-Paris pair of very upmarket tea and pastry / luncheon restaurants, and , it seems caterers. The Paris Rumplemeyers is presently known as Angelina’s and is still on the head of the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries.
Aha! Thank you Ellen.
I think we will be moving on to names more of the Smith, Bletchley, Pratt and Whitbread variety!
Which is not to disparage the Rumpelmayers and Scrope Purvises of the book! I really loved the use of those names - a lot can be communicated by a good choice of name! 'Dalloway' for example, has a very satisfying lilt to it somehow.
I love your section But D hasn’t got very far…
This popped out of my In-box today and is the impetus for me to finally read this book. Thank you, Tash, for putting it all together!