Reading Order
Mrs Dalloway Reading Order
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a standalone novel that takes place over a single day in post-World War I London, following Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party that evening, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran she never meets, who moves through the same city on the same day. One of the defining texts of literary Modernism and stream-of-consciousness fiction.
Where to start
Mrs Dalloway
Complete Mrs Dalloway Book List
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Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
To the Lighthouse
OptionalVirginia Woolf·1927·The Ramsay family at their summer house on the Isle of Skye, over two visits ten years apart — Woolf's most beloved novel and the most accessible introduction to her technique; shares Mrs Dalloway's stream-of-consciousness method and its preoccupation with time, memory, and loss. - Buy
The Waves
OptionalVirginia Woolf·1931·Six characters speak their inner monologues from childhood to old age — Woolf's most experimental novel and her own favorite among her works; more demanding than Mrs Dalloway but the culmination of her formal project. - Buy
Orlando
OptionalVirginia Woolf·1928·A nobleman in Elizabethan England who wakes up as a woman in the eighteenth century and lives to the present — Woolf's most playful and exuberant novel; entirely different in tone from Mrs Dalloway but showing her full range.
Mrs Dalloway — Frequently Asked Questions
What is stream of consciousness, and is Mrs Dalloway difficult to read?
Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that renders the continuous flow of a character's thoughts, perceptions, associations, and memories without the conventional ordering of dialogue and scene that most fiction uses. In Mrs Dalloway, the narrative moves fluidly between the inner lives of its characters — from Clarissa's memories of Bourton to Peter Walsh's recollections to Septimus's hallucinations — connected by the sounds of the city (the motorcar, the airplane, Big Ben striking) rather than by plot. Many readers find the novel more immediately accessible than its reputation suggests: it is short (about two hundred pages), and Woolf's prose, while dense with psychological texture, is also lyrical and pleasurable. The difficulty is not in following the narrative — the events of the day are clear enough — but in the challenge of holding the novel's web of association and meaning together. Readers who are patient with its rhythms find it deeply rewarding; readers who need a driving plot may find it frustrating.
What is the connection between Mrs Dalloway and The Hours by Michael Cunningham?
The Hours (1998), Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a direct homage to Mrs Dalloway that follows three women across three decades: Virginia Woolf herself in 1923 as she begins to write Mrs Dalloway; Laura Brown, a 1940s housewife in Los Angeles reading Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary New Yorker whose nickname is 'Mrs Dalloway' and whose day mirrors the structure of Woolf's novel. The Hours works as an independent novel but rewards prior reading of Mrs Dalloway enormously; the parallels between the characters, the recurring motifs, and the way Cunningham translates Woolf's preoccupations (the party, the flowers, the suicides, the relationships between women) into three different historical moments are the novel's primary pleasures.
Who is Septimus Warren Smith and why is he in Mrs Dalloway?
Septimus Warren Smith is a World War I veteran suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder — in 1925 London, he is diagnosed with 'shell shock' and threatened with institutionalization. He never meets Clarissa Dalloway; they occupy the same city on the same day but their paths do not cross. His function in the novel is to parallel and counterpoint Clarissa: where she is a woman of privilege who navigates her world through social grace and repression, he is a man destroyed by the violence of history that privilege cannot acknowledge. His suicide — which Clarissa hears about at her party — is the event that allows Clarissa to understand something about her own life and her own suppressed self. Woolf originally intended to make Septimus and Clarissa the same character; separating them into two people who never meet was the crucial formal decision that gives the novel its structure.
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