Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) Read Online Free PDF

mid-June 1923. 2 Both the place and the time grow increasingly remote from culture as we know it today. This gulf calls for the identifications and mappings that begin in this introduction and continue in the notes and the map of Mrs. Dalloway’s London. With a closer knowledge of place-names, streets, shops, government buildings, and monuments, we can appreciate the rich political contexts and social commentary Woolf has packed into this novel, having said early on, “I want to criticize the social system, & show it at work, at its most intense” (
Diary
2: 248). Her concerns include the politics of a world war recently ended, of a questionable empire entering decline, and of people in power who have the dangerous options of passing judgment on and even controlling the lives of the outsiders who consistently won Woolf’s attention.
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    Genealogy
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    W ITH
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf entered her most productive and confident phase as a writer. At the age of forty, when she was at work on
Mrs. Dalloway
, she had three previous novels to her credit (
The Voyage Out
, 1915;
Night and Day
, 1919; and
Jacob’s Room
, 1922), a collection of short fiction (
Monday or Tuesday
, 1921) that included the remarkable experimental works “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” (both written in 1917), and a growing reputation as an essayist and a reviewer of fiction, biography, drama, and art. Her work appeared in such prestigious periodicals as the
Times Literary Supplement, Criterion
(edited by T. S. Eliot), the British
Vogue
, and American publications including the
Dial
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, and the
New Republic
. She had entered into critical conversations defining the nature of modern fiction (“Modern Novels,” 1919; revised as “Modern Fiction,” 1925), and was thinking about the ways that character had changed in the modern world (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1923). Both of these topics no doubt stimulated the critics’ interest in what she might do with her own method. On the political end of the creative spectrum, Woolf was beginning to venture with her essays and speaking engagements into polemics about feminism and imperialism.
    Her first novel,
The Voyage Out
, gave Woolf a fine foundation for her future writing. In several ways this work looks ahead to the politics and plot of
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf explored a young woman’s subjectivity as it developed on her travels out to South America, where she stayed near a hotel populated by English travelers. Rachel Vinrace encounters unfamiliar cultural and geographical terrain, as well as persistent British patriarchal forces, as does Elizabeth Dalloway in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf also plays with the marriage plot in
The Voyage Out
, as Rachel becomes engaged to another vacationer, Terence Hewet, and begins to face up to societal expectations for her future.
    Among those Rachel encounters while still aboard her father’s ship, the
Euphrosyne
, is a couple named Dalloway. Their behavior, if not their social position, is very different from that of the same-named older pair we encounter in
Mrs. Dalloway
. They impress Rachel—Clarissa, with her exquisite features and air of control; Richard, with his machine-like grasp of politics. This early Clarissa is a delicate, fashionable woman who places a premium upon ladylike behavior as she assesses her shipmates. She is protected from the chill with veils and furs, and unlike the Vinrace women, must lie low from seasickness shortly into her voyage. Clarissa in
The Voyage
Out
supports her husband’s mission abroad as his photographer and diarist, and acquiesces to his positions, including his denunciation of women’s suffrage.
Speaking with Richard in their own cabin, she glories in English identity and his sense of empire—values that Woolf would shift somewhat to other characters in
Mrs. Dalloway
, making her central couple more likable