Her own solution evolved as she wrote more about the fictional Briggs, a nineteenth-century burgher who thought the “new book by Mr Keats was trash” and who did not know of, and would not have cared about, the immortal Coleridge’s reverence for him. She leaped with a novelist’s freedom into the mind of Mr. Briggs, and, in giving him decided opinions of his own, she found the way to use herself as the protagonist of her work. In the dozens of reviews Woolf had written in the years after the Armistice, she had used the first person only two or three times, and only incidentally. More than a decade of unsigned reviews in the Times Literary Supplement required an oracular anonymity she had perfected, and the conventions of these and other assignments had until now precluded anything other than “we,” “one,” “the reader,” and “you.” Woolf had once written of the novelist George Meredith, “But if the sense of the writer stepping out from behind his books and delivering his message in person is abrupt and disturbing in some instances, it is singularly refreshing in others.” In drafting “Byron and Mr. Briggs,” “Virginia Woolf” delivered her message in person for the first time.
Within days of this breakthrough, she was writing “with the usual fabulous zest. I have never enjoyed writing more. How often have I said this? Does the pleasure last? I forget,” she wrote in her diary. Virginia may have made Mr. Briggs a contemporary of Byron and Keats, but she was a twentieth-century woman writing in 1922, and, as a chronicle of her own progress, she put specific dates throughout the essay and gave the publication date of The Flame of Youth as March 26, the day the clocks were changed.
“In England at the present moment,” Woolf wrote, “books are published every day of the week and every week of the year. The stream sometimes dribbles and sometimes gushes. But it is continuous and many waters of all salts and savours go to make it.” She was writing not only as a critic but also as a publisher, parodying the commercial pressures and idiocies of publishing; and of course she was a writer herself. Hogarth would add her own Jacob’s Room to the “stream” later in the year, and also, it seemed, Tom’s new poem, which he’d promised them for autumn a few weeks before. Would some Mr. Briggs of today think Tom’s poem, like Keats’s, was “trash”? Would Jacob’s Room be the talk of the season? Would it matter if it were? What about a posterity for her own books? Would there be more or less of one now that she felt free to write what she liked?
These questions came to the fore as Virginia moved through the generations to Briggs’s grandchildren, characters she made her common readers of 1922. She set a scene in which she found them arguing about books for pleasure, speaking to one another with ease and, as she put it, a “sort of shrug of the shoulders as if to say ‘That’s what I think. But who am I?’”
This was Virginia’s question as a critic, as a reader, and as a writer, and imagining an answer to it led her back to thoughts of her own fiction. As she continued with the essay, she described “a little party of ordinary people, sitting round the dinner table, & talking.” And making up this little party was a cavalcade of her own characters, among them Terence Hewet and Mr. Pepper from The Voyage Out, and Rose Shaw and Julia Hedge, two characters in Jacob’s Room. Virginia set them talking with each other about Milton and Shakespeare, Hardy and Tolstoy, and other authors. Terence and Rose and Julia, characters from separate books written almost a decade apart, joined by virtue of Virginia Woolf’s having created them, chat about literature and life, gossiping among themselves about “who will marry who; what the Prime Minister said, have you read Byron’s letters?”
One of those at the dinner table was Clarissa Dalloway.
* * *
Clarissa had been a minor but memorable character in The Voyage Out. The voyage out is a trip from England to South America on the Euphrosyne, a cargo boat, owned by the father of Virginia’s heroine Rachel Vinrace. The boat takes passengers only by arrangement. Rachel is traveling with her aunt and uncle, and there is a gallery of other characters, including a love interest for Rachel. Clarissa Dalloway and her husband, Richard, are not part of this group. They have become stranded in Lisbon, and because “Mrs Dalloway was so-and-so, and he had been something or other else, and what they wanted was such and such a thing,” it is fixed that the Euphrosyne will rescue them, and they come aboard for the short distance they have to travel. Clarissa is the daughter of a peer and Richard is a former member of Parliament who, unable “for a season, by one of the accidents of political life, to serve his country in Parliament,” has been touring Europe in order “to serve it out of Parliament.” Mrs. Dalloway, “a tall slight woman, her body wrapped in furs, her head in veils,” boards the ship carrying a dressing case “suggestive of a diamond necklace and bottles with silver tops.” Clarissa and “Dick” become part of a drawing-room comedy at sea, dropped into the novel as shipboard acquaintances would be in life, and plucked out again when, a few days and a few chapters later, the ship arrives at the Dalloways’ destination. When they disembark—Richard Dalloway having pressed himself upon Rachel during a moment alone and given her her first kiss—Clarissa gives Rachel a copy of Persuasion as a memento and writes her name and address in the flyleaf as proof of her conviction that she and Rachel will become friends upon Rachel’s return to London. Once they have disappeared from view, one character says, “Well, that’s over. We shall never see them again.” Relieved they are gone, Rachel’s aunt Helen thinks Clarissa “was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature” and advises her niece to be discriminating about friendships. “It’s a pity to be intimate with people who are—well, rather second-rate, like the Dalloways, and to find it out later.”
Second-rate in Helen’s opinion. When Lytton Strachey read The Voyage Out, he wrote to Virginia with high praise for the novel, but singled out, “And the Dalloways—oh!—.”
By 1922, when Virginia did see Mrs. Dalloway again, it had been almost a decade since she had written about her. But she had thought of her much more recently. In February 1920, she reread The Voyage Out. It had been almost seven years since she had read it, in the summer of 1913, and she wrote in her diary that she could not fix upon what she thought of it now—“such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like God’s truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish.” Virginia made some cuts for the forthcoming American edition and removed an entire chapter late in the book. For copyright reasons, “the more alterations the better,” she had written Lytton, asking him to be “so angelic as to tell me if any special misprints, obscurities or vulgarities” occurred to him. He offered one minor correction. “I have put it in,” she wrote him. Undoubtedly there were hundreds more that ought to be made, she added, “but it can’t be helped.” She changed nothing about the Dalloways. Then, in September 1920, Lytton visited Monk’s House for a weekend. During one of their talks, he praised The Voyage Out “voluntarily,” Virginia wrote in her diary, perhaps remembering that his earlier enthusiasm had been effusive but rather belated, coming a year after the novel’s publication, and therefore perhaps received by her as only obligatory. He had reread the novel, Lytton told Virginia, and had seen that it was “extremely good, especially the satire of the Dalloways.”
From the start of her career she’d been worried that, as she had early on told Clive Bell, she had “so few of the gifts that make novels amusing.” Jacob’s Room was built around the absence of a central character. Jacob’s room is empty. He is dead, killed in the war. Even Leonard, who would praise the novel as her best work so far and “amazingly well written,” told her that in it “my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works this way.”
If she had few of the gifts that made novels amusing, what were those few and what were others she might discover? What might she do that would please the common reader and herself? She gathered her puppets into the essay, gave them brief histories, and listened to them speak. Terence Hewet, in The Voyage Out an aspiring novelist, now became a d
escendant “on his mother’s side” of Tom Briggs of Cornwall. The thimble-pated Clarissa, now set chattering with the other characters, praises the poetry of Donne and speaks as if she had inscribed Rachel Vinrace’s copy of Persuasion only moments before: “Mrs Dalloway confessed to a passion for Donne on the strength of his portrait chiefly ‘and some of the poems if you read them aloud—alas! my husband never has time to read to me now—though so difficult are extraordinarily moving.’” Virginia wrote the dinner party as if with Lytton over her shoulder, doing what she could to keep the satire of the Dalloways extremely good.
When Hewet praises War and Peace as the “most sincere book in the world,” Clarissa, as self-assured as ever (and perhaps not quite so thimble-pated), thinks this is “a little too serious for life.” She keeps silent—“she had an Englishwoman’s respect for litrature [sic]”—even as her smile threatens to give her secret judgment away. But Clarissa has no interest in considering it any more deeply. Nor, as it happens, does she have the time. She must “fetch her husband from the House at ten,” because they are going to an evening party being given by Clara Durrant, a character in Jacob’s Room who in that novel actually is the hostess of a large evening party. In Leonard’s opinion this was perhaps the only “lapse” in the otherwise “very interesting, & beautiful” book. Richard and Clarissa are taking Rose Shaw with them, and Mrs. Dalloway, “sitting up,” almost as if she’d dozed as she prepared her excuses, says they must leave. “Come,” Clarissa says to Rose. It was time for them to go to “Mrs D’s party.”
In February, Virginia had eyed Katherine Mansfield’s popularity—“So what does it matter if K. M. soars in the newspapers, & runs up sales skyhigh?”—and, disclaiming any jealousy, framed her own future against her rival’s. She herself was after “some queer individuality” and had made up her mind, she wrote in her diary, “that I’m not going to be popular, and so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain.” She came to a firm conclusion: “I’m to write what I like; & they’re to say what they like.”
“Byron and Mr. Briggs” was the first thing she wrote in this new state of mind. Woolf’s typescript eventually reached thirty-eight pages. She revised it so heavily that in places it became “almost impenetrably overgrown” with alterations. Then she abandoned it. Leonard did not include it among the many previously unpublished essays he printed in several posthumous collections. It was unseen for almost six decades.
But the essay had been a crucial step. With her dinner party she had written her characters and herself into a conversation about—and with—some writers and some masterpieces of the past. Donne was alive in 1922 because there were women like Clarissa Dalloway either reading him or recalling the romance of their husbands’ former habit of reading poetry aloud to them. Donne and Tolstoy lived in the minds of people, whether or not they were able to, or cared to, have a sustained intellectual—and perhaps bloodless—discussion about them. It was not just satire that Clarissa had given Rachel a copy of Persuasion. Virginia’s dinner party of her own common readers was a way of revealing that anew. Here, in their table talk, was at least a part of what posterity must mean for a writer.
Soon Virginia was writing not only with zest, but according to her regular daily habits, including word counts calculated in the margins. The hybrid form of her draft became a preferred mode for her criticism, and when she came, the next year, to write an incisive exploration of character in fiction that perfected her new method, she imagined not a dinner party but a train car, and envisioned a woman, Mrs. Brown, sitting in it. Woolf argued that writers like John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett, sitting opposite Mrs. Brown, would be so absorbed in describing externals that they would miss the “solid, living, flesh-and-blood Mrs Brown.” It was not a coincidence that she faulted male writers for what they would fail to see about a woman. But it was also a more substantive issue about modern fiction. In fact a living character could be revealed only if she were seen from within, Woolf was to write. She adapted the title of the new essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” from the alliterative title of its unpublished predecessor and made it immediately contemporary. Bennett was still prolific as a novelist and critic—and with her new title she gave prominence to the novelist’s way of seeing a woman as the modern standard by which he or, more to the point, she must be judged. The male writers she named had not yet achieved the necessary perspective, but neither had she herself. “Mrs Brown will not always escape. One of these days Mrs Brown will be caught,” Woolf prophesied. “The capture of Mrs Brown is the title of the next chapter in the history of literature.”
By the time she published “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in November 1923, in the New-York Tribune, she was already well on her way in that chapter. Almost immediately after setting aside “Byron and Mr. Briggs,” Virginia began a story in which the resurrected Clarissa Dalloway was the main character. She wrote quickly and, by mid-April, was able to tell Tom Eliot, who had asked her for a story for an early issue of his forthcoming London magazine, that though she thought “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” might be finished in three more weeks, by early May, it would more likely take her six. And he had asked her for a story of fewer than five thousand words. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” would be too long, she told him, so after it was done she would try to write something else for him, however “ticklish” a thing it would be to write to order for him. “When one wants to write, one cant [sic].” He would have to be both sincere and severe with her. “I can never tell whether I’m good or bad,” she wrote, and she would respect him all the more, she wrote, for “tearing me up and throwing me into the wastebasket.” And what about his poem?, she asked. When would they see it? Then she could “have a fling at you.”
Virginia began “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” just as she had begun “Byron and Mr. Briggs,” as an experiment. But she grew more confident as she worked on it. She had only recently been lamenting the “little creatures in my head which won’t exist if I don’t let them out.” Then another month passed and she had devised the dinner party in “Byron and Mr. Briggs.” After a year of disappointment, she found a further way forward by writing about a little creature who already did exist. Virginia continued to revise and expand her story about Clarissa Dalloway long past May, into the summer. And even once the story was finished, and she was at Monk’s House in August, she did not seem to be finished with this character who had been dispatched so easily so many years before. Woolf continued to think about Clarissa and what more might be done with her and through her. Mrs. Dalloway was her own Mrs. Brown, and when, in autumn 1922, Woolf began to see that “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” was growing into a novel, it occurred to her that the “Mrs D.” giving the party would be not Clara Durrant but Clarissa herself.
* * *
Virginia had begun “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” when her days were still largely proscribed by uncertain health and by her doctors’ limitations. And so she wrote a story that begins with a woman doing what Virginia wished she could do, simply leaving her house, and on a happy errand: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the silk herself.” Woolf wrote her first drafts by hand and later typed them. In the typescript of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” she changed “silk” to “gloves,” and the story continued:
Big Ben was striking as she stepped out in to the street. It was eleven o’clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach. But there was something solemn in the deliberate swing of the strokes; some[t]hing stirring in the murmur of footsteps.
Time gave a structure—and immediacy—to the story, more effectively and more subtly than specific dates had done in “Byron and Mr. Briggs.” Sounds ordered the day, the implacable authority of Big Ben ringing in the air, and against that, the murmur of footsteps, including Clarissa’s own, all of the sounds, from one extreme to the other, contributing to the noisy metropolitan flow.
Clarissa’s leaving her house at eleven to buy gloves suggested
a leisurely start to a June day for a “charming woman, poised, eager, strangely white-haired for her pink cheeks,” older than when last seen in The Voyage Out. She was a woman who had no reason to rise early; eleven o’clock was as unused as most or all of her hours could be, if Mrs. Dalloway preferred. But the gaiety of her errand was quickly clouded. Once she is outside, Clarissa becomes aware, but as if only from a great distance, that in the bustle around her not everyone is “bound on errands of happiness.” A passerby notices that Clarissa seems prematurely aged. Perhaps not all of her own errands have been happy ones. The hour of eleven might be an “unused” hour. But it also was a sacred one, as the “something solemn” in the strokes suggested. Even on a glorious June morning, the striking of eleven o’clock would have registered for Clarissa and the entire city as an echo of the war, of the Armistice that began at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918. On Remembrance Day, inaugurated in November 1919, a two-minute silence was observed at eleven o’clock. The first stroke of eleven “produced a magical effect,” the Manchester Guardian reported.
The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition.
Someone took off his hat.… Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of “attention”. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes.… Everyone stood very still.… The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain.… And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.
At the end of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” Clarissa is paying for the gloves that she set out to buy. The shopgirl, who has been slow in bringing Clarissa’s change, makes small talk. “Gloves have never been quite so reliable since the war,” she says, rousing Clarissa to reproach herself for having been annoyed by the girl’s “snail” pace. “Thousands of young men had died that things might go on,” she thinks.
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