'The word 'time' split its husk; poured its riches over him...'

A SUMMARY of the first half of 'Mrs Dalloway'

Hello friends!

Already we are in the thick of June — for some the weather is warm and sunny, for others very cold! (I write this wearing a coat with a scarf wound around my nose and mouth, waiting for the heater to take effect and looking, I imagine, like a desk-bound, slipper-clad Shackleton.¹)

And already we have ploughed right into the very middle of Mrs Dalloway. Thank you all for the excellent discussion happening in the comments to the previous post — some very astute and interesting observations. I’m learning as much as anyone and am finding the whole experience really wonderful! Good on you! And good on me for getting this thing off the ground. I am patting myself on the back in a very endearing self-satisfied way.

Today I will give a SUMMARY of the first half of the book (minus the first twenty-five pages — you can find a summary of that here).² Like before, I’ve written the summary using a mix of italics and normal text. Read just the italics if you only want a brief reminder of where we got to OR read the full post if you want a more detailed snapshot.

The purpose of these summaries is really just to make sure we are not leaving any of our number behind. As I’ve written elsewhere, I found Mrs Dalloway quite challenging the first time round so I am keen to smooth the way for others. However! I realise that many of you are Woolfian old hands. In which case, feel free to skip to near the end where I outline some questions and things to think about.

Rightio (*flexes typing fingers, adjusts mouth scarf). Let’s get stuck in!

Key to abbreviations

D = Mrs Dalloway; PW = Peter Walsh; S = Septimus Warren Smith; R = Rezia (aka Lucrezia).

Summary of the first half

D returns home and reminisces about her passionate, youthful love for Sally Seton.

D returns home from buying flowers and finds out from her servant, Lucy, that Lady Bruton has invited Richard, D’s husband, to lunch without her, which hurts D’s feelings. She retreats to her room upstairs. As she puts her coat away and undoes her hair, D remembers her first, pure, passionate love for Sally Seton — a young woman her own age who was beautiful and wild. Sally was the more worldly, the more reckless, and opened up D’s conservative and cloistered existence. D recalls Sally kissing her on the lips while they were up on the terrace at night — a radiant experience for D which was interrupted by the arrival of PW; hostile, jealous, wanting to break up their intimacy.

While D is mending her dress for the party, PW pays an unexpected visit.

D takes out her green dress from the cupboard. It was torn at a previous party and she decides to mend it herself in the drawing room (her maids having already too much to do). While at work on the dress, the front door bell rings. It is PW back from India, paying D an unexpected visit. Their reunion is by turns hot and cold. D reminisces about the past while PW is focused on the future — he has fallen in love and is to marry (if he can sort out his fiancee’s divorce).

The visit ends with PW in tears; he leaves soon after.

Their meeting culminates in PW bursting into tears which removes the awkwardness between them. But then they are interrupted by D’s daughter, Elizabeth, and PW makes an abrupt exit (with D calling after him an invitation to her party).

After leaving D’s, PW walks through London streets and ends up in Regent’s Park where he falls asleep on a bench.

As PW walks away from D’s house in Westminster, he spots a young woman and begins to follow her, inventing a story about her, inventing a romantic interaction, until she disappears into one of the houses in a backstreet. After that, he enters Regent’s Park, sits down on a park bench and falls asleep.

On waking, PW thinks back to D’s rejection of his marriage proposal.

PW dreams. When he wakes up, he thinks about D, Bourton, the arrival of Richard Dalloway and his dawning realisation that D would marry Richard. Nevertheless, PW still brought things to a painful point and, in a ‘final terrible scene,’ D rejected him.

Across the park from PW is R who interacts tenderly with a little girl.

In Regent’s Park, PW observes a little girl, playing near her nurse, run full tilt into a lady’s legs. The lady is R, who stands the little girl up, dusts her off and kisses her.

R returns to S who is still behaving strangely; a dog approaches which S sees turn into a man; it frightens him.

When R returns to S, he is sitting on a park bench staring at the sky and muttering to himself. She is unhappy and finds it hard to reconcile this behaviour with Dr Holmes’ assurances that there is nothing the matter with S. Meanwhile, S ruminates on the ‘supreme secret’ that his madness has revealed to him: ‘that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next love, universal love…’ and imagines he must urgently report the supreme secret to the Prime Minister, the Cabinet. A dog approaches them; S sees a vision of the dog turning into a man, which terrifies him. At the same time, he perceives beauty all around him.

As PW exits the park, he passes R and S believing they are young lovers quarrelling. He continues to reminisce about D, Sally Seton, Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway.

PW passes R and S and imagines they are young lovers quarrelling. He falls into further reveries of Sally Seton and Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway. Richard was a good sort, sensible, not brilliant. Sally, he remembers, hated Hugh who kissed her against her will in the smoking room. Back then, Sally implored PW to save D from the Hughs and Dalloways of the world, the ‘perfect gentlemen.’ (Sally herself ends up marrying a rich man.) After loss and grief (D’s sister died young in an accident), D became a skeptic and PW perceives that D ‘evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.’ Though it is also in her nature to enjoy life.

PW realises he doesn’t love his fiancee. If only he’d married D and been saved from all this.

As PW exits Regent’s Park, he realises that, at 53, ‘one doesn’t want people.’ Life is enough. He also realises that it is his fiancee, Daisy, who loves him rather than the other way around and his strong feelings about her mostly have to do with jealousy rather than love; of Daisy meeting with other men. His tears, when he met D, were about this — the realisation that D might have spared him from this — jealousy; marriage in his fifties; an unanchored and flippant impulsiveness — that she had reduced him to this ‘whimpering, snivelling old ass.’

Opposite the Tube station, an old beggar woman sings a song, holding out her hand for money.

Opposite the Regent’s Park Tube station, an old woman sings an old folk song and PW gives her a coin as he gets into a taxi, while R looks on her with pity. S and R are making their way home. S has an appointment with a new doctor.

Much of S’s anguish derives from the death of his close friend Evans in the War.

We find out about S’s past — how he left home, was swallowed by London, fell in love with Miss Isabel Pole who lectured on Shakespeare in Waterloo Road, read widely and experienced a period of youthful enlargement driven by literature and exposure to new ideas. S found work as a clerk and was well liked by his boss, Mr Brewer. When war broke out, S was one of the first to enlist. He went to France to save England (which consisted, in his mind, of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole). While serving, he drew the attention and affection of his officer, Evans, and the two became very close — ‘They had to be together’. But when Evans was killed, S congratulated himself on feeling very little. Soon though, S became terrified that he could feel nothing at all and in a moment of panic, while billeted in the house of an innkeeper in Milan, he proposed to Rezia, the younger daughter of the house.

After S married R in Italy, they returned to England; it was at that point that S’s mental health began to deteriorate.

The couple returned to England but to S everything was spoilt — Shakespeare, Dante, other people (all S sees is vice), love-making (S finds copulation is filth to him). Finally he was so unwell that Rezia put him to bed and sent for a doctor — Dr Holmes.

In recent weeks, Dr Holmes has attended S and offered glib counsel. S has gotten worse and considered suicide.

Dr Holmes assured them that there was nothing wrong with S. He counseled S to take up a hobby and put on weight. In the period that followed, S felt under siege by ‘human nature’ and that he was being punished for various crimes, the worst of which was that he had not cared when Evans was killed. He feels himself condemned to death for his crimes and considers suicide. Holmes attends him again and counsels him not to frighten his wife with talk of killing himself. S increasingly feels himself under attack by Holmes, who begins to attend him regularly. At one point, he hears Evans talking to him from behind a screen and cries out to him. This frightens Rezia who sends for Holmes.

All of this has led up to the present day — a day when S will consult a different (more expensive) doctor — Sir William Bradshaw.

A few things to think about

As always, there is SO MUCH to think about and investigate further. If you’re looking for lines of inquiry, you could take up any of the following:

• What do we know about Mrs Dalloway at this point?

• What do we know about Peter Walsh?

• What do we know about Rezia and Septimus?

• What are the different categories of love experienced by the characters? Clarissa and Peter Walsh, Clarissa and Sally Seton, Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, Peter Walsh and Daisy, Septimus and Miss Isabel Pole, Septimus and Evans, Septimus and Rezia. (It appears to me that Clarissa and Septimus’s most passionate relationships were the same-sex ones.)

• Any thoughts about the appearance of flowers at various moments? (My impression is that they act as little memento moris throughout the novel, highlighting the fleetingness of life and ever-presence of death.)

• Any thoughts about metaphors involving birds?

• What does the old beggar woman singing opposite Regent’s Park tube station bring to the story?³

• What is the interplay between past and present? (In this segment of the novel we hear a lot about each character’s backstory, yet it’s also clear that these events that happened years earlier, sometimes decades earlier, are vividly present to characters at every moment.) How do respective characters relate to the past? Any thoughts on representations of time?

• Where do you notice moments of contrast, light and shade, a change in atmosphere or pace? (For me, an obvious point of contrast was moving from the bustle of the city to the quiet of D’s home: ‘she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.’)

What’s next?

Two days hence, I will post a CLOSE LOOK at the scene in which Peter Walsh pays that surprise visit to Clarissa.⁴ There will be no THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS from me this time round — just the CLOSE LOOK post. So if you have thoughts or observations, prompted by the first half of the novel or an item in the list above, please share them in the comments below if you like!

Otherwise, please keep reading! You now have the rest of the month to read the second half of the novel. That’s right — I am leaving you to your own devices until 28 JUNE, at which point I will post a SUMMARY of the second half and we can pick up our discussion then.

(All our reading group activity for Mrs Dalloway can be found in one place on my substack under the Mrs Dalloway tab at the top.)

In our neck of the woods

Finally, I just wanted to mention a few happenings in our neck of the substack woods:

• One of our number,

  Ronald Turnbull
  , is writing about Virginia Woolf’s short story, The Symbol, on his substack. And he will be providing extra commentary and context on the story next week. (Also, I can’t help but notice that Ronald has a book hot of the press — The Hillwalking Bible. If you live in a country where ‘hillwalking’ is a known and familiar term, why not pick up a copy!)

Other book group activity on substack:

• John Halbrooks
  at Personal Canon Formation has just started reading Jane Austen’s Emma.

• haley larsen, phd
  at Closely Reading is right in the middle of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I’m loving it!

• Simon Haisell
  at Footnotes and Tangents is right in the middle of his year long slow read of War and Peace, though I believe he is also in the process of selecting a piece of historical fiction for next year. Keep a look out! Always good to scan ahead so you’re ready!

• Joshua Doležal
  at The Recovering Academic recently finished a slow read of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. I was sorry to miss it as that book has been on my list for quite some time. Helpfully, Joshua recently pulled together all his posts on My Antonia in one place so you can follow along whenever it suits you.

Thanks friends (and sorry for the long post). Until very soon!

1. It’s a look I’ve refined over many winters. And yes, I know I know - it’s not that cold. I can see all of you Canadians and other northerners rolling your eyes at my Australian feebleness.

2. In case you missed my first post, my reading group posts come in three varieties: SUMMARIES, CLOSE LOOKS (at a single scene or limited bit of text), and THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS.

3. The strange meaningless syllables the old woman sings are apparently a translation of a German poem Allerseelen (‘All Souls’ Day’) by Herbert von Gilm and set to music by Richard Strauss. The English version (quoted in Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, pp 150-1) is:

Lay by my side your bunch of purple heather,
The last red asters of an autumn day,
And let us sit and talk of love together,
As once in May, as once in May.

Give me your hand, that I my press it gently,
And if the others see, what matter they?
Look in mine eyes with your sweet eyes intently,
As once in May, as once in May.

4. I am suddenly very busy in my offline life so that post might run a little late — my apologies!