A year and a half ago, I planned out what I wanted to read during Women’s History Month. I titled my list “Woolf at the Door.” It included Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Hermione Lee’s thick biography of the author, and two more books based on Woolf’s fiction: Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours and Katherine Smyth’s literary memoir All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. Excited to share my reading plan, I put on a red cape to make me look like Little Red Riding Hood and posed with the stack of books for a picture to post on social media.
Instead of Virginia Woolf, March 2020 brought a more vicious wolf to my door. As Covid-19 spread around the globe, I put Mrs. Dalloway aside briefly in order to prepare for what was coming. My spouse David and I went from store to store searching in vain for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. We wandered down aisles of empty shelves and picked up all the containers of peanut butter, dried beans, popcorn kernels, and other shelf-stable provisions which we hoped might see us through what we expected to be several weeks or possibly even months of chaos.
Soon, colleges began to close. David drove up to help our son and one of his international friends pack up their dorm rooms and move in with us. Toilet paper was still on my mind. Thinking of Clarissa Dalloway going about her day while preparing for the party she would host that evening, I said I would order the toilet paper from a big-box store myself.
After I had straightened my bookcases and put clean sheets on the pull-out couch for our guest, I searched through lists of books about the 1918 flu epidemic and downloaded a couple of samples to my e-reader. The first book I read was one that had been published only a few months before the pandemic had begun: Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka.
Critics and readers have long discussed how Mrs. Dalloway is a response to the horrors and grief of World War I. Perhaps the most obvious nod to the war’s continuing presence in people’s lives is Woolf’s character Septimus Smith, a veteran who suffers from shell shock and is overwhelmed by pangs of isolation. “We are trained in modernism to see the trauma of war,” wrote Outka before the COVID-19 outbreak began, “but not the trauma of pandemic.” Just as Septimus is grappling with the aftereffects of war, Clarissa Dalloway is still recovering from a bout of the flu which has weakened her heart. Virginia Woolf, also a survivor of the flu, “investigates the cumulative, composite blows the war and pandemic together have on the societal and individual body,” as Outka says.
At a moment when we struggle against the impact of not only COVID-19 but also the political insurrection in the United States and threats to democracy around the world, readers will experience the immediacy and relevance of entwined crises in Woolf’s novel. Into this very Woolfian moment, Liveright has released The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway — complete with stunning photographs, paintings, maps, and other images as well as an introduction and notes written by the brilliant scholar Merve Emre. Her annotations illuminate how profoundly Woolf was responding to the experiences of illness and war in a novel full of both interiority and community, both suffering and life.
In her extensive introduction, Emre points to two techniques that Woolf uses to populate the world of Mrs. Dalloway. First, the novelist creates complex characters whom she places in everyday situations — perhaps walking under trees in a park, puzzling out skywriting made by an airplane overhead, or coming together for an evening party. While these situations are relatively meaningless on their own, Woolf uses them to allow the reader “to plumb the depths of [the characters’] thoughts,” as Emre says, by seeing how these quotidian experiences “stir their emotions and concentrate their memories.”
Next, by showing how the individual characters respond in different ways to these universal situations, Woolf portrays how each individual’s thoughts are part of a larger social consciousness. Emre argues that Woolf sought to display “the continuity between the world people shared and the sane and insane worlds they created in their minds.” When Woolf combined her specific style of character development and her theory of community consciousness, Emre says, she was able “to melt away the distinction between the inner and outer world” — making her work revolutionary and distinctly modern.
Emre’s annotations in this new edition of Mrs. Dalloway are both broad and deep. Some brief notes clarify references to businesses or places — for example, explaining that the “Rumpelmayer” mentioned in the second sentence of the novel was a world-renowned caterer and candymaker, or describing what a particular statue memorialized. Some of her notes provide more historical context — such as an explanation that Big Ben did not chime for two years during the First World War. These notes are often extremely useful to clarify situations unfamiliar to modern readers. Emre uses longer annotations to highlight her literary research findings. In these she often discusses the biographical connections between Woolf’s life and various characterizations in the novel, the way the novelist worked out both the ideas and the structure of Mrs. Dalloway in her private journals, and the evolution of both the characters and plot from short stories and drafts up to the final version of the novel.
In addition to these contributions, many of Emre’s annotations are thoughtful explanations of how various critics and scholars have interpreted the novel. One of the most intriguing examples appears late in the book when Emre wonders if Clarissa’s reaction to a death near the end of the book is sympathetic or if it is merely “an extension of her snobbery.” She tells us that scholar Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative argues that Woolf “judges and condemns English civilization in times of war and peace” by presenting Clarissa’s love for life as a form of resistance. Julia Briggs, on the other hand, argues that the death functions as merely a sacrifice which allows the lives of the upper class to continue unchanged. After presenting these conflicting interpretations, Emre considers how the work of the scholars raises an additional set of questions about the evolution of the novel. In just two short paragraphs printed in the wide margin reserved for notes, the annotator has introduced her readers to a stimulating scholarly debate.
These notes and insights alone would make The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway an exemplary edition, but Emre also includes crystalline moments of her own literary analysis. Sometimes she flags what she calls echoes — particular words or images that Woolf has used earlier in the book. These notes subtly point to the novelist’s careful structuring of the narrative. At other times, Emre provides bolder interpretation. She makes the argument, for example, that when Clarissa looks out of her window and sees an unnamed elderly neighbor, it is not only an echo of the novel’s early description of Clarissa herself as an elderly woman but also a statement that the image “reveals to us the utter ordinariness, the contingency, of Clarissa’s character.” Rather than the story of Mrs. Dalloway, the novel could have been just as successful had it been written about the elderly neighbor. What matters is not the uniqueness of Clarissa’s individual character, Emre seems to be saying, but instead the importance of humanity’s effort to really see the people who surround us.
[Left: Merve Emre] Thinking back to the early days of our pandemic, I am moved by Clarissa’s dual recognition of both the suffering and the joy that echoes throughout her society and her life. “Oh, thought Clarissa,” writes Woolf, “in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.” Even in this moment when death has walked through her door, Mrs. Dalloway urges us to embrace life. In fact, the immediacy of death is what helps her appreciate the simple and necessary actions of every day: “straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf.” She realizes that even when “there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear,” at the same time “she had never been so happy.”
Clarissa invites her guests to feel that vitality as well. Her party is, as she recognizes, a gift to those around her — and even to us, although our own parties may still be held on Zoom or perhaps around a firepit. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, with Merve Emre’s introduction and annotations, is its own kind of offering: an illumination of Woolf’s words that will bring the text to glorious life for today’s common readers.
[Published by Liveright/W.W. Norton on August 31, 2021, 320 pages, $35.00 hardcover]