Mrs Dalloway was published in 1925. It was Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel and, together with To the Lighthouse (1927) and
 The Waves (1931), represent the peak of her achievement as a novelist. In her previous novels, The Voyage Out (1915),
 Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf had been working towards a new type of fiction, along the
 lines of such modernist writers as Joyce and Proust; a novel which was understood as a breakthrough from the premises of
 the prevailing realism such as was practised by the leading novelist of the British literary establishment, notably Bennet and
 Galsworthy.

 The main lines of this new movement, or this new mood, since it pointed to a new concept of life and art, were a sense of
 displacement, of alienation from the old world of Victorian values solidly established and apparently unmovable.

 After the shock of the First World War, human nature changed in the words of Virginia Woolf. It was no longer possible to
 believe in the old creeds such as religion or the Empire, the basic goodness of social institutions, the traditional family, the old
 Protestant ethic of work and thrift, or even to maintain the faith in human reason. The old liberal optimism with its basic
 foundation on human personality and the deeds it could achieve was definitely shattered. Consequently, there was a
 movement away from the external world of action to the inner world of being; a preoccupation with the inner workings of the
 mind and the complexities of human relationships; a complex and tentative probing through the world of sensation towards
 the reality hidden under each subjectivity. In these circumstances, the traditional narrative tools, such as plot, character
 creation, time development, authorial omniscience were but useless tools. A new language and a whole set of techniques had
 to be created anew to deal with a world in which time was no longer felt as linear, the mind a blank page on which myriads
 of impressions impinge upon.

 Virginia Woolf takes up this challenge in Mrs Dalloway. According to her own words in her diary, she intends to compress
 her world view in the 200 pages of her novel. ‘I want’, she says, ‘to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise
 the social system, and show it at work at its most intense’. So far her words do not differ greatly from any statement of
 intentions of any great novelist. But she adds to her vision a new design in which all the parts will fit together, through what
 she calls my tunnelling process by which she tells the past by instalments, unifying the different characters of her picture
 through a bending of time and a narrative technique which fuses the interior monologue with authorial commentary.

 The novel, within the framework of twenty four hours in London, consists of two intertwined lines of development, having for
 centres of interest first Mrs Dalloway, outwardly the perf ect London hostess, and secondly Septimus Sinith, a shell-shocked
 ex-soldier. These two sets of characters and incident develop alternately, coinciding momentarily at different points in space
 and time made concrete by objects, people and scenes which flash across the consciousness of the principal characters in
 both series. The Prime Minister’s car, an aeroplane spelling out an advertisement in the sky, a little girl playing in Regent’s
 Park, an old woman singing by an underground station or a mere impression of kaleidoscopic changes due to the lights and
 shadows. And each time the author abandons one series to follow another. Thus, on the one hand Clarissa Dalloway, after
 going to buy flowers for her party, meets Peter Walsh who has been, and still is, in love with her. He roams aimlessly about
 London; Mr Dallowy, with another friend of Clarissa’s, lunches with Lady Bruton; Elizabeth, Clarissa’s daughter, goes
 shopping with Miss Killman, an old maid who gives her history lessons and tries to inculcate piety. That evening all these
 characters, forgather with many others at Mrs Dalloway’s party. The same day, Septimus Smith and his wife Rezia go for a
 walk in Regent’s Park before visiting Dr. Bradshaw, a specialist in nervous diseases who advises sending Septimus to a
 mental home. When the latter is sent for that same evening he throws himself out of the window. The Bradshaws, guests at
 the Dalloway’s party, tell the story of the suicide, bringing together the two lines of fate and the central idea of death.
 Originally Woolf had conceived of an even closer fusion by making Mrs. Dalloway kill herself at the end of the party.

 This framework is only a pretext. What is actually revealed to us is the whole of Clarissa Dalloway’s life and that of Septimus
 Smith, echoing one another, not just as they have lived, of course, but as, accumulated in the protagonists’ mind, they fill and
 colour and affect their present existence, what they do and what they are. This integration of past with present, through
 memory and sensation, is the discovery of Virginia Woolf. Thus, by a succession of interior monologues, set off by some
 sensation which brings back its homologue from the past and, with it, an associated train of places and people, feelings and
 thoughts, we discover in Clarissa, on the one hand, her parents’ summer home at Bourton, her 18-year-old self, her
 passionate relationship with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, her giving-way to Dalloway; and on the other, Westminster and
 her life as a mother and wife of a mediocre politician, and her unabridged gap between desire and reality. By the same
 process we know of Septimus’ painful war experiences, his marriage, and final collapse, due to his inability to feel, an
 experience that Virginia Woolf herself painfully admitted to have endured in her periods of unrest.

 Even from this brief summary, which misrepresents the flashbacks by depriving them of their wealth of impressions and all the
 intellectual reverberations that make them meditations in depth, we can see the sort of relation that the author makes in the
 lives of the heroes. She retains only her loves and marriages, the reactions to life imposed on them by society and the
 moments that subjectively have importance and relevance for them, minimal as they may seem to an observer. She is trying to
 portray the hidden, the inner life, the depths of that leafencumbered forest, "the soul". And this is explored by the
 unconstrained consciousness of the heroes. They lost themselves in time, to find themselves in timelessness abandoning their
 outer appearance, the surface they present to people and to things: Clarissa, the respected wife and dominating mother;
 Septimus, an odd and possibly dangerous man. Then they recover their confused and mysterious wholeness in which loves
 and hates are at once fleeting and eternal, aspirations infinite, judgements contradictory and loneliness a prison peopled with
 ghosts.

 The casual and meaningless way in which the heroes’ lives are reconstructed reveals the shallowness of apparent contacts
 and, on the other hand, emphasises the profound unity that comes from participation in the inward experience of life in its
 moments of "revelation". These beings, Clarissa and Septimus, not only communicate with one another through identical
 emotions, but are superimposed on one another. Septimus, through his neurosis, amplifies all Clarissa’s reactions and plays in
 the novel the role of an echo chamber. The explosion of the Prime Minister’s car startles Clarissa, who thinks of a pistol shot;
 for Septimus, 'The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?' Life is for Clarissa something that one is constantly
 making up, building around one, creating every moment afresh in its unique novelty. And the hallucinated vision of Septimus,
 with its exaggerated yearning for love and beauty is of the same nature. Identical, too, are their alternations of joy and terror
 which, in the form of loneliness and love, apprehension of death and ecstatic delight in existence, mark the pulse of that
 awareness of life whose keenness is the dominant trait of these protagonists.

 'What one feels’ has become for Clarissa the only thing that matters. And it is precisely the loss of the power to feel that
 terrifies Septimus Smith and leads him finally to suicide. By throwing away his life, now become meaningless, he
 consummates the symbolic sacrifice made by Clarissa when she threw a coin into the Serpentine. Clarissa, Peter Walsh and
 Septimus Smith are involved in the pursuit of reality behind appearances. Clarissa, by marrying Richard, had condemned
 herself to a compromise. Peter, the solitary traveller, half-way between Clarissa’s surrender and the intransigence of
 Septimus, is doomed to social failure. And Septimus, guilty of the unpardonable crime of latching meaning to words of a
 symbolical kind is literally cast out by society. Thus, the social criticism is grafted on to the psycho-metaphysical theme of the
 novel. Politics, money, religious intolerance, everything in our civilisation which is built on ready-made ideas into which feeling
 does not infuse significance, creates around human beings a prison parallel to that in which our own nature confines us, so
 much so that to Septimus’ visionary mind it becomes its concrete embodiment.

 The themes of loneliness, of the impossibility of knowing other people, of the futility, renunciation inherent in existence recur
 constantly. Nevertheless the burden they lay on human beings is lightened at certain privileged moments filled solely with the
 miracle of life. These perfect moments of vision, as Virginia Woolf called them, change life into an exciting adventure where
 poetry is overwhelming. They make us cling to life in spite of all its bitterness. And certain people carry with them a sort of
 power that renders them sensitive to the beauty of life and at the same time makes them mediums through whom other
 people are sensitised in their turn. clarissa is one of these people. Her power is nameless as it is indefinable and can be
 summed up in a single word: being. The final sentence of the novel 'For there she was’ does not only assert Clarissa’s
 material presence, it sums up her very presentness.

 There is another resource open to individuals, even to those most utterly despised and rejected by existence, the Rezias or
 the old woman singing by the underground station, one ultimate weapon against despair and defeat, memory. The aura of
 happiness which, throughout the book surrounds the manifold returns to the past counteracts the pessimism that pervades the
 present. But both, memory and those intense moments of vision are but partial victories over death. Sally Seton compares life
 to a prison cell on whose walls one scratches in vain, and the vision of life portrayed by Virginia Woolf in this novel is of
 extreme cruelty as it is shown in the images and vocabulary that permeates the novel with singular precision and poignancy.
 The recourse to past happiness through memory or to that unfailing sensitivity which is summed up in moments of intensity or
 keenness of existence, is intermittent and personal. The obscure and hostile forces of society and life remain intact. Septimus
 is just a madman. Clarissa is a society woman. They are heroes on a weak scale.

 Nevertheless, the figure of Clarissa Dalloway dominates the novel. In fact, Virginia Woolf has tried to open a new path and
 build a character along new lines. If she is the centre of the picture, all the other characters, even the flattest ones like Mr
 Dalloway, converge towards her, to mingle and blend with her substance. This blurring of outlines and this fusion of beings
 reveal an order of reality entirely different from that which the term character, personality, hero, normally imply. What we
 have here is no longer somebody or something, it is not an object or a person which though more or less complex is
 nevertheless determined, difficult as it may be to trace his outline; what we have is a nexus of relation, a manifold participation
 in all that lies around absorbing ít all into his own substance, which is constantly altered by this contact. It no longer is; it
 becomes. She has done away with the life-like bias of realism. 'These are characters’, she says, ‘without any features at all’.
 We go down into them as we descend into some enormous cavern. With these figures whose realism has dissolved away,
 Virginia Woolf can henceforward take liberties, bending them to her intentions, giving them the form which will hold the
 content she seeks to put into her work, and the transparency which will reveal the essence she wishes to communicate.

 And what she wishes to communicate is that vision of the universe which each one of us has, and which is made up of the
 relations which the ‘I’, that central enigma where everything happens and from which everything emanates, maintains with
 what lies around it: individuals, society, events, nature. From the traditional point of view, at least from that of those she
 called materialists, all these elements, circumscribed in their definition, solid with conviction, can be juxtaposed and set out
 like so many objects. But for Virginia Woolfl reality, life, aren’t like that: they form a luminous halo, condense around our
 impressions, and they can only be expressed by means of these sensations. And it is only because human beings are the seat
 ot these that they remain the medium to which the novelist must have recourse.