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MRS DALLOWAY
Virginia Woolf
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
Mental Health and Creativity
It would be fair to say that Virginia Woolf was an intense and complex personality. Some might describe her as highly imaginative, sensitive and creative, while others might use the words high-maintenance, introspective and obsessive. In truth, she was all of the above, which meant that she was highly regarded as a novelist by many and entirely disregarded by others.
The central sticking point with the latter was that she came from a highly privileged, upper-middle-class background, yet she viewed the world in quite a negative light. Untroubled by the daily pressures of most, her time was spent in deep analysis of life – or rather, her own life and that of her friends and family. Her literature, therefore, could occasionally disconnect with the lay reader, because her concerns could be seen as self-indulgent and focused on a rarified environment to which most people were not privy.
As a human specimen, Woolf was not a very robust figure. She was prone to bouts of depression and breakdown, in part possibly brought on by the lack of any necessity to just get on with activities that were positive for her mental and physical constitution. In the absence of responsibilities to toughen the character, she lived in a world of ever-decreasing circles until, one day, her horizons closed in so tight that she chose suicide as a means of escape. She filled the pockets of her overcoat with pebbles and walked headlong into a river to drown her sorrows, quite literally. Her life was ended by her own thoughts and actions at the age of 59.
Woolf is a classic case of an artist whose creative expression was bad for their health. Had she abandoned writing in favour of an occupation that took her mind away from her obsessive thoughts, she would undoubtedly have lived a happier and more fulfilled life, but instead she became the author of her own undoing. So, a weighty question remains: was it worth all the pain and suffering? Inevitably those with similar leanings will say yes, because they are able to identify with Woolf’s desire to commit her thoughts to the written word as a kind of catharsis. Inevitably those who cannot identify will say no, because her work offers nothing to which they can relate as they have no need of therapy. It may be that there has never been a more divisive novelist in the history of English literature, and this is probably Woolf’s most interesting aspect.
Woolf’s main influence on modern literature was her ‘stream of consciousness’ approach to prose. Her novels were really vehicles for the copious current of thoughts and emotions to flow without parameters. She was an aesthete and intelligentsium, investing all of her mental capacity into understanding and disseminating the minutiae of human nature, human society, human culture and the human condition. Woolf and her set could be seen as looking down on those who chose not to analyse human existence in such microscopic detail, but realistically this was probably the result of insecurities about one’s own talent, context and significance. The one thing that is certain about belief systems is that believing things doesn’t make them true. This is certainly not to say that Woolf’s portfolio has no value – far from it – but that we do well to remember the context of the author. After all, it was precisely because she existed in her particular milieu that she produced her pioneering style of literature. Moreover, had she been born into a more typical, lower-middle or working class background, she would probably not have had the wherewithal to dissect humanity to such a level.
Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf’s prolific patch continued in 1925 and 1927, when she published Mrs. Dalloway and then To the Lighthouse. In these two novels, she displays the kind of original approach to prose that would forge her reputation as a literary genius. Woolf experimented with innovative approaches to writing that set her apart from her contemporaries by largely abandoning plot in favour of psychological exploration. She made it her mission to delve into the human condition – something most people took so much for granted that they failed to consider its importance.
Of course, this approach didn’t make her books easy to read, but the whole point of the method was to challenge literary norms. Just as one needed to apply effort to understand the work of the Cubist artistic movement, which was prevalent at that time, so Woolf published literature with a similar requirement for analysis. She had turned the novel into high art. This wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it would inevitably prove very influential. It was a sea change in defining the purpose of the novel, as the author was no longer expected to take the work to the reader. Instead, the reader was expected to do their own work and accept the challenge of interpreting a text’s meaning. It was an intellectual workout on offer, rather than an unthinking stroll. Inevitably, this catalysed a division within the realm of the novel, as it divided into the ‘literary novel’ and the ‘commercial novel’. The landscape of fiction publishing had been irreversibly altered by progress, and Woolf was at the forefront of the march to modernity.
The surface plot for Mrs. Dalloway is simply that Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to host a party in the evening. But beyond the surface, Woolf explores the thought processes of Mrs. Dalloway as she is prompted to reflect on her life and past events. Central to the novel is reference to the effect of World War I on British society in the post-war years and, in particular, the loss of loved ones and the altering fate of those left behind. The consequences of this included the physical and psychological damage done to those who fought and survived, as well as to those who survived despite never having set foot on the battlefield. It all adds up to an odd juxtaposition of people carrying on their lives, with parties, families and friends, while an unspoken suffering erodes their happiness.
The chronology of To the Lighthouse brackets World War I, examining the societal transformation caused by the conflict. The eponymous lighthouse is the summer home of the Ramsay family, on the Isle of Sky, in the Hebrides archipelago, off Scotland. The dynamic of the social environment inevitably changes year after year, but the war causes an abrupt change, due in part to the hiatus, but also due to three deaths – one from old age, one from combat and one from complications in childbirth. The use of the lighthouse is, of course, symbolic as a metaphorical guiding light that leads people to safety in life’s travels. Despite the turbulence that life has wrought on the surviving members of the family, they manage to maintain the notion that meeting at the island provides them with a sense of insight and contentment that their world would otherwise lack.
Woolf’s general take on society and the individual lives of her characters has an air of the upper-middle class about it, as those are the people seen to throw parties and have holiday homes, but this doesn’t detract from the weight of her prose or to remove her meaning from the reaches of other readers. This is because she uses these characters as devices to bring protagonists together in order to investigate the interaction of personality with great skill.
The Bloomsbury Set
Virginia Woolf came from a background of intellectualism, however, this was largely cemented by her family’s relocation from Kensington to Bloomsbury, where she became part of an intellectual elite known as the Bloomsbury Set. Together, they were all goldfish in the same bowl, looking out at the world around them with a similar artistic palette.
The pretentions of her social group actually allowed her to blossom as a writer, because she was given the encouragement and freedom she needed to experiment with her prose. In short, she was allowed to think of herself as an author and she was told what she wanted to hear. This was vitally important to someone with nagging self-doubt, so she developed deep and lasting bonds with those who saw and nurtured her potential. Indeed, she married one of them – Leonard Woolf – and remained devoted to him.
In time, of course, the pretentions of the Bloomsbury Set transcended into success, as they were undoubtedly intelligent, talented and well educated. This process of ascendance was, in part, aided by a number of stunts designed to draw public attention. One stunt in particular has become famous for its daring and humour: the Dreadnought Hoax. This was an elaborate plan to gain egress to the battleship HMS Dreadnought for no other reason than to have a good look around. A number of the Bloomsbury Set, including Woolf, disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes. They wore the appropriate garb of robes and turbans, but they also ‘blacked-up’ and sported fake beards. With escort and interpreter in tow, they boarded a VIP coach and took a train from Paddington to Weymouth, where they were received as genuine royalty with honour guard and allowed to inspect Royal Navy fleet. All the while, they pretended to communicate in a foreign tongue by uttering gibberish furnished with Greek and Latin, which the interpreter duly pretended to understand and translate.
Having returned to London, a photograph of the Bloomsbury Set, still in character, was sent to the Daily Mirror newspaper and the hoax was revealed. Not surprisingly, the affair turned into a scandal. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy were the target of a great deal of finger-pointing, partly in fun and partly in seriousness for allowing such a blatant lapse in national security. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the Bloomsbury Set were pacifists, which only served to rub salt into the wound. When the Navy high command pushed to have the perpetrators punished, they found themselves powerless to do anything. For one thing, no laws were broken, and secondly the consensus was that they themselves should be punished for allowing themselves to be beguiled by such a lame practical joke.
Needless to say, the Dreadnought Hoax planted the Bloomsbury Set in the public consciousness once and for all, as the oxygen of publicity was theirs to breathe in and enjoy. The hoax occurred on 7 February, 1910. Woolf’s first novel was begun the same year, although she did not publish until 1915, by which time she was already a minor celebrity.
Despite her subsequent success, Woolf was never particularly contented, for she had such a troubled soul and indefatigable mind. Today her malady would, doubtless, be described as a bipolar condition, for she oscillated from exuberant mood highs to despairing clinical lows. In the end, she was convinced that she would never come full circle again, so she decided to cut her losses while in the grip of a crushing depression that rendered her unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Virginia Woolf died in 1941, leaving behind a highly respected, progressive and considerable canon of essays, critique and novels.
Table of Contents
Title Page
History of Collins
Life & Times
Mrs. Dalloway
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
Copyright
About the Publisher
Mrs. Dalloway
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.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. 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? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace – Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings like this about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh – the admirable Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than walking in the country.”
They had just come up – unfortunately – to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors”. Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance; and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of Jim’s boys, – she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton – Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her. If he were with me now what would he say? – some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning – indeed they did. But Peter – however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink – Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right – and she had too – not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably – silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her – perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton – such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home. Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How much she wanted it – that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of them.
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