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Bruton is sixty-two, but dreams of being a little girl in Devon, playing with her brothers in the clover. Miss Helena Parry, past eighty, lives in her memories of India, and the glorious triumph of her book about the orchids of Burma. Finally, there is the nameless old woman Clarissa sees from her window, alone, putting out her light, and going to bed.
    Throughout the day Clarissa is haunted by the dirge from
Cymbeline
:
    Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
    The heat of the sun stands for sexuality, for a kind of feminine blossoming and ripening which peaks in the heat waves of the June day and of the reproductive cycle, and ends in the furious winter of old age. Elizabeth is a ‘hyacinth which has had no sun.’ That is, she isa virginal flower, like a lily, as Sally Seton remarks. Clarissa’s own sexuality has always been muted and moonlit; her one memory of erotic bliss has the delicate intensity of ‘a match burning in a crocus’ (p. 35).
    The parallels between the sexual and the natural cycles are reinforced by the colour of women’s attire, almost always green as if it were a kind of leafing or natural exfoliation of the female body. For the young girls this identification seems innate and spontaneous. Elizabeth is ‘like a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green’; at the party, the debutante Nancy Blow, though she is ‘dressed at great expense by the greatest artists in Paris’ looks as if ‘her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.’ (p. 195) Septimus is entranced by the memory of Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square, and sees his wife Rezia as a ‘flowering tree’. Clarissa too admires ‘lovely old sea-green brooches’ at the jewellers, and her favourite dress is ‘a silver-green mermaid’s dress.’ Even Miss Kilman wears a green mackintosh coat.
    In another sense, Clarissa’s retrospect of her sexual history has to do with her time of life. Woolf’s original intention was to show Mrs. Dalloway as a woman going through menopause. This theme is clearly, if euphemistically, alluded to in ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,’ when Clarissa compares herself with the ailing Milly Whitbread, come up to London to see doctors for a vague woman’s ailment:
    Of course, she thought, walking on, Milly is about my age – fifty, fifty-two. So it is probably
that
. Hugh’s manner had said so, said it perfectly – dear old Hugh, thought Mrs. Dalloway, remembering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion; how shy, like a brother –one would rather die than speak to one’s brother – Hugh had always been, when he was at Oxford; and came over; and perhaps one of them (drat the thing!) couldn’t ride. How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do things with men?
    Although this passage was revised in the novel, and the references to menstruation and menopause edited out, Clarissa’s time of life (‘T. of L.’, as Woolf would later call it in her diary) 45 has much to do with her sense of ageing, mortality, and loss. The illness or influenza which has turned her hair white and left her a kind of nun is a metaphor for the loss of fertility, for the unnamable ‘women’s ailments’ of her generation. The passage is particularly ironic in the contrast between Clarissa’s adolescent internalization of menstruation as a crippling obstacle to women’s participation in public life, and the change which took place after the war, when for the first time, there were indeed eight women sitting in Parliament.
    Menopause is sometimes called the ‘little death’ of women. As we see in the story, menopause not only could not be discussed in polite company, but was implicitly linked with illness. In the 1920s it fascinated and even obsessed Woolf. Although she was in her early forties when she wrote
Mrs.