Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the later work. The early Clarissa does read
Antigone
(an important text of protest for Woolf), and seems to feel that Rachel will benefit from having her copy of Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
. She competes to some extent with Rachel’s aunt, Helen Ambrose, in affection for Rachel. One remarkable scene that has invited lesbian analysis finds Helen tumbling Rachel in the pampas grass, anticipating an enduring strain of interest in women loving women in Woolf’s texts.
    The Richard of
The Voyage Out
, though temporarily voted out of Parliament, is accustomed to being granted special arrangements—like transportation on the Vinraces’ ship. He aims at impressing readers of the London
Times
with his ability to gather information about unsettled conditions abroad, and he gains the attention of Rachel with his programs to improve working women’s problems at home. When he encounters Rachel alone, Richard exposes his vulnerable listener to his own ungoverned desires, kissing her passionately. Woolf takes us into subsequent nightmares Rachel experiences, and we are left to decide how traumatic this event has been for her. As Rachel dies of a fever, she moves metaphorically and mentally beyond the reach of her intended husband in the final pages of this first novel. Strategic deaths of her protagonists remained a powerful option for Woolf in later novels, including
Mrs. Dalloway
.
    Night and Day
(1919) was Woolf’s most traditionally plotted novel, as author Katherine Mansfield pointed out in a somewhat dismissive review that deeply troubled Woolf. As a representative of the genre of “new woman” fiction, however, it contributes to Woolf’s clear feminist trajectory. Woolf is very much concerned with young women’s use of their minds. One of the leading characters, Katharine Hilbery, is fascinated with
mathematical theory. The second female protagonist, Mary Datchet, labors stoically on behalf of the suffrage movement. As in her former novel, Woolf is concerned with the difficulties of finding a productive partnership between a woman and a man. Katharine’s first engagement is to William Rodney, an aspiring writer who aspires also to control her. Katharine has much more to say to the young lawyer Ralph Denham, her eventual partner. Mary Datchet is much admired by both Ralph (whom she loves) and Katharine, suggesting an intricacy of early cross-gendered friendships. Both this sort of multivalent friendship and a woman’s choice of a partner to preserve her own autonomy remain important in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Katharine’s mother, who is perennially engaged in writing a biography of her poet father and other literary projects unlikely of completion, remains a part of Woolf’s fictional universe. Dotty as ever, she attends Mrs. Dalloway’s party.
    With her third novel,
Jacob’s Room
(1922), Woolf launched herself more than ever into experimental form. Her method involved the representation of the young man at its center from the perceptions of the characters who surround him. Politically, Woolf offered a study of the institutions and experiences that shape a young man of her own educated class, often at the expense of the women in their lives. Like so many of his generation, Jacob perishes in World War I. Both the experiment in rendering character, and the interest in the effects of war would persist in
Mrs. Dalloway
. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, we pass the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, who, like Jacob Flanders, fell in Belgium. Leonard Woolf (who typically read Woolf’s novels in manuscript) suggested that she might build upon the discoveries she had made in rendering character for
Jacob’s Room
in her subsequent work.
    The writer who turned from
Jacob’s Room
to new projects late in 1922 was an experienced and determined professional.
    She was involved in an impressive variety of tasks, and management of all of them seems to have instilled self-confidence. She had a