It’s impossible to sum up the novel Mrs. Dalloway without feeling like you’ve left out something essential. Recently, I attempted to describe the book to someone who’d never read Virginia Woolf.
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“Basically, it’s a day in the life of a woman in high-society London who’s planning a party,” I said. “It’s 1923, so World War I is still hanging over everybody.”
But that didn’t sit right. What about Peter Walsh? Sally Seton?
“It’s also about how our memories of being young and in love never leave us,” I quickly added.
Still, I’d hardly scratched the surface. I rambled on about streams of consciousness, Big Ben ticking away, life, death. “Everything,” I wanted to say. “It’s everything.”
Surely it’s the sign of a remarkable work of art that it cannot be pinned down to any one definition, that you can find something new in it at each encounter. May 14 marks 100 years since the publication of Woolf’s groundbreaking modernist novel, which has been dissected time and again by scholars, writers, and readers alike. Though not Woolf’s most experimental or critically acclaimed work, in 2025, Mrs. Dalloway may be her most beloved. Each June, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and fans around the globe celebrate “Dalloway Day,” commemorating the protagonist’s iconic walk through the streets of London. From short stories and annotated editions to movies and stage adaptations, readers today relish the multiverse of media connected to the novel.
Before Clarissa Dalloway “said she would buy the flowers herself,” she “said she would buy the gloves herself.” So begins the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” which preceded the novel. Versions of the 52-year-old socialite and wife of a Conservative member of Parliament appear in several other short stories Woolf wrote during and after Mrs. Dalloway, which were published posthumously in a collection called Mrs. Dalloway’s Party in 1973. But Clarissa began germinating in Woolf’s mind well before the novel and its spin-offs. The character and her husband Richard briefly board the Euphrosyne in Woolf’s very first novel, The Voyage Out, which was published in 1915.
The Dalloways of The Voyage Out are “simply caricatures of their class—worldly, jingoistic, snobbish, smug, philistine, and utterly devoid of inwardness,” writes Alex Zwerdling in “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System.” A decade later, Woolf breathed more life into them. The Clarissa of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” though still a “satiric object,” Zwerdling says, has an inner life, one displayed through Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style. This inner life gets fully realized in the novel, where Clarissa is no longer merely a representation of her class but an individual full of contradictions, irreducible to one definition. Though her public self conforms—“the perfect hostess,” Peter Walsh once called her—her private, passionate self still thrives in solitude. As the day unfolds, potent memories of being young and in love with Sally Seton, the captivating, rebellious friend of her youth, bubble up to the surface of her thoughts.
Clarissa’s depth is the result of what Woolf described as her “tunneling process.” “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters,” she wrote in her diary in 1923. “I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth.” The effect is enamoring. Clarissa becomes a sort of study of what happens to the self over time, says literary critic Merve Emre, who edited Liveright’s The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway in 2021. “What does it mean,” Emre mused to me recently, “that we can remember ourselves at 18—as political radicals, as youthful idealists, as budding lesbians—and then 30-plus years later we look at the life we’re leading and it bears no resemblance to the life and the potential for life that we believed in when we were 18?”
Decades later, another Clarissa—not Woolf’s but one inspired by her—exudes a similar yearning in the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham. This Clarissa, Clarissa Vaughan, lives in New York City in the 1990s. She’s married to a woman (named Sally), and is planning a party for her dear friend Richard, a man with whom she was once in love. Alas, she is no longer 18, summering in Wellfleet, feeling as if anything could happen; she is “a girl grown into a woman.” She has a good apartment and a solid marriage. Still, she can recall so clearly walking with Richard along a pond at dusk and the kiss they shared. “It had seemed like the beginning of happiness,” Clarissa thinks. Now, 30 years later, she is “still sometimes shocked” to realize “it was happiness.”
Throughout The Hours, Cunningham employs much of Woolf’s ideas on character (her philosophy of digging out “beautiful caves” is quoted in the book’s epigraph). Much like Clarissa Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan and the other characters that shape the novel contain multitudes. There’s Laura Brown, a housewife in Los Angeles in 1949 who loves her son but finds motherhood oppressive, and Woolf herself, who gets fictionalized in the novel, a writer who infamously committed suicide yet wrote so brilliantly about the beauty of everyday life.
Cunningham’s book was in every measure a success. It won a Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner award and was adapted for the big screen in 2002. The film had a star-studded cast—Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, to name a few—and won Kidman her first and only Oscar. Two decades later, an opera adaptation of The Hours premiered at The New York Metropolitan Opera, with world-renowned soprano Renée Fleming starring as Clarissa Vaughan.
To many contemporary readers, Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours are inextricably linked. In 2022, Picador published a combined edition of the books. In the introduction, Cunningham says: “I’ve never been entirely sure what to call The Hours in relation to Mrs. Dalloway. The best I’ve been able to come up with is the word ‘riff’—the way a jazz musician might play variations on an existing piece of great music.”
A riff, an homage, a love letter, the story’s existence, and its success beyond the page, is a testament to the inexhaustibility of the work on which it’s based. “If most of us read the same murder mystery or romance,” Cunningham writes, “few of us read the same Portrait of a Lady, or the same House of Mirth. Or the same Mrs. Dalloway.”
I was 19 when I read my Mrs. Dalloway for the first time. It was assigned reading for a freshman literature course at the University of Texas. It made me feel like the dumbest person alive. My first read-through, I barely gleaned anything. “Read it again,” a friend in class encouraged. And so I did, this time aloud. My world exploded. Reading Clarissa walk toward Bond Street—“the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June”—I thought, though I’d never been to London, this is exactly how it feels to be alive.
When I returned to the book five years later, so much about life had changed. It was 2020, and COVID-19 had shut the world down. Home alone for days on end, I wanted to feel the rapture I’d felt when I first read the book. Now, the pandemic imbued it with new meaning (Clarissa “always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day”). Emre, who worked on The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway in 2020, says the endeavor was an especially apt pandemic project: “It’s a novel that is registering the aftershocks of a moment of unprecedented mass death. It is deeply preoccupied with different systems of keeping time after it feels like there has been a massive historical rupture in the world.”
Returning to it again at 29, I find new meaning in it still. While in my teens and early 20s, I placed tidy judgments around the characters—Clarissa, an unhappy wife riddled with regret; Peter, an unfortunate, dejected soul—now, I’m more inclined to see them for what they are on the page. I no longer believe that when Clarissa thinks fondly of her past that she is unhappy in the present, nor that Peter is defined by his heartbreak. I try to extend this empathy to myself.
Perhaps no moment solidifies this irreducibility—what Emre calls a “philosophy of dispersed being”—as clearly as the scene when Clarissa returns home from buying flowers and looks at herself in the mirror. She sees the glass “collecting the whole of her at one point” and senses how deceptive that is. She purses her lips “to give her face point,” as if to draw all of the parts of her together into “one centre, one diamond, one woman,” though she knows “how different, how incompatible” they are.
It’s an impossible task for anyone, no matter how hard we try, to maintain a neatly bound concept of ourselves, one that does not change over time. We cannot control what others think of us, nor how they will perceive us from one day to the next. Herein lies the beauty of the novel. It is not Clarissa, despite how captivated the other characters are by her, that keeps us returning to the book a century after its publication. Woolf could have employed her “tunneling process” on anyone and made us listen. Still, we would be asking the same unanswerable questions: What does it mean to live in time? To feel certain of one thing at 18 or 19 and entirely different at 29 or 52? To know that one day we “must inevitably cease completely?”
There’s an irony in the fact that the woman who presents us with these questions is fictional and will therefore never perish. She exists within a book that can be revisited over and over and within the minds of readers, as long as they remain. It’s a fitting fate for a character who believes in an unbounded self, destined, in a sense, to be exactly as she imagines: “laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.”