Number 6: Clarissa Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel is the story of a day in the life of an upper-class fi ctional hostess in London. The protagonist Clarissa, who is preparing for a party in the evening, is more of an anti-heroine than a straightforward leading lady and the novel focuses on her thoughts and desires as she wanders London’s streets like a flâneuse. As she shops, memories of her halcyon childhood at Bourton interrupt her thoughts.
Written to show Clarissa’s interior life, her private moods rather than actual events, this is one of the great stream-ofconsciousness novels of modernism, as the story moves backwards and forwards in time and in and out of diff erent characters’ voices, to yield an image of the ills of Britain’s ossified social structure after the First World War.
Clarissa regrets her marriage to the respectable Richard Dalloway, in preference to the enigmatic Peter Walsh, and regrets even more that social conventions meant she could never have lived with her thrilling, androgynous friend, Sally Seton.
The complex literary style is partly testament to Woolf’s belief that for women, the subjective life of experienced moments matters more than the outer, public life, because it off ers a space not regimented by patriarchy. Her friend Peter Walsh says Clarissa’s charm lies in her joie de vivre and though the text suggests she is more melancholic than she might appear, there is no mistaking the affirmative optimism of Woolf’s protagonist.
Written to show Clarissa’s interior life, her private moods rather than actual events, this is one of the great stream-ofconsciousness novels of modernism, as the story moves backwards and forwards in time and in and out of diff erent characters’ voices, to yield an image of the ills of Britain’s ossified social structure after the First World War.
Clarissa regrets her marriage to the respectable Richard Dalloway, in preference to the enigmatic Peter Walsh, and regrets even more that social conventions meant she could never have lived with her thrilling, androgynous friend, Sally Seton.
The complex literary style is partly testament to Woolf’s belief that for women, the subjective life of experienced moments matters more than the outer, public life, because it off ers a space not regimented by patriarchy. Her friend Peter Walsh says Clarissa’s charm lies in her joie de vivre and though the text suggests she is more melancholic than she might appear, there is no mistaking the affirmative optimism of Woolf’s protagonist.