Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

"Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street"

(1922)

Virginia Woolf

(December 30, 1865– January 29, 1963)

Notes

154  a head grown grey...From the contagion of the world's slow stain: From Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1821 poem "Adonais" in memory of poet John Keats

154  have drunk their cup a round or two before: From Omar Khayam's Rubaiyat.

Essays

And modern literature in spite of its imperfections has the same hold on us, the same endearing quality of being part of ourselves, of being the globe in which we look upon respectfully from outside.  Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries.

—Woolf, Virginia.  “How It Strikes a Contemporary.” 1923. The Essays of Virginia Woolf.  Vol. 3. 

Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, pp. 353-60.

In contrast to those whom we have called materialists Mr Joyce is spiritual; concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain, he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, though it be probability or coherence or any other of the handrails to which we cling for support when we set our imaginations free.

    But is it possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright and yet somehow strictly confined apartment rather than at large beneath the sky to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind.  Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never reaches out or embraces or comprehends what is outside and beyond?  Does the emphasis laid perhaps didactically upon indecency contribute to this effect of the angular and isolated? […] In any case we need not attribute too much importance to the method.  Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express.

[...]

“The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks, whatever one honestly feels.

    All that fiction asks of us is that we should break her and bully her, honour her and love her, till she yields to our bidding, for so her youth is perpetually renewed and her sovereignty assured.

—Woolf, Virginia.  “Modern Novels.” 1919. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3.

Ed. Andrew McNeillie.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, pp. 30-37.

 Review Sheet

Characters

Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway – "A charming woman, poised, eager, strangely white-haired for her pink cheeks, so Scrope Purvis, C. B., saw her" (152)

Hugh Whitbred – "'We've just come up [...] Unfortunately to see doctors'" (153); "when he was at Oxford" (153)

Places 

London – "I love walking in London" (153)

    Picadilly – "Quoting Shelley, in Picadilly!" (154)

    Bond Street – "walked towards Bond Street" (155); "A hundred years ago her great-great-grandfather, Seymour Parry, who ran away with Conway’s daughter, had walked down Bond Street. Down Bond Street the Parrys had walked for a hundred years, and might have met the Dalloways (Leighs on the mother’s side) going up. Her father got his clothes from Hill’s" (155)

Time 

June –  "for Mrs. Dalloway June was fresh" (152); "June had drawn out every leaf on the trees" (153)

    11:00 a.m. – "It was eleven o'clock" (152)

Sample Student Responses to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" 

Response 1:

Study Question:

Reference

Further Reading

Dick, Susan. Introduction. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed, Hogarth P, 1989, pp. 1-6.

Dick, Susan. Editorial Procedures. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed, Hogarth P, 1989, pp. 7-13.

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Last updated March 15, 2021