Every morning that summer, on the hour bus ride from Nashua, New Hampshire into Boston, I read from Mrs. Dalloway again. Often, I only read those thrilling first couple of pages until I could nearly recite them from memory, and then I would gaze out the window at Boston’s approaching skyline, a sight that was equally stirring to me at the time. As I alighted the bus at Back Bay and walked to my office, the smell of diesel fuel surrounding me, I would say to myself, “What a lark! What a plunge!” Repeating Clarissa Dalloway’s exclamations gave each of those summer mornings the mark of great potential, as well as a sense of whimsy that didn’t come naturally to me.
At nineteen, I was hired as an unpaid marketing intern for a non-profit: my first career experience. Before I got this summer internship, I was interviewed at a boutique literary agency on Newbury Street. When the editorial assistant asked my favorite book, I gushingly said Mrs. Dalloway. She’d asked why, but I couldn’t articulate it. I hadn’t really thought about the whys then. I reddened and stammered, simply saying I loved anything by Virginia Woolf, even though Mrs. Dalloway was the only novel of hers I’d read. The editorial assistant was kind, older than me but still very young—cool and fashionable in a way I’d never be. She rattled off more titles and authors I should read, should know, but I didn’t pay attention. I was too embarrassed to absorb any of her recommendations. I left that literary agency feeling as if I didn’t know anything about Mrs. Dalloway, not really, not yet.
After that interview I decided to pick up the book again, to know it well and be ready to articulate that knowing, should anyone ever ask again. In my subsequent reading that summer, I realized that Mrs. Dalloway wasn’t only about a fifty-two-year-old woman throwing a party that evening, or her foil, Septimus Smith, a war veteran suffering from what we now know as PTSD. Mrs. Dalloway revealed itself to be about the distance between our internal and external selves, the nature of memory, existence and madness. But Mrs. Dalloway was also, inexplicably, even more than that.
At lunchtime on those summer afternoons, all throughout June and into July and August, I would sit on the grass of Copley Plaza with the other marketing intern, a woman I looked up to for having just graduated and for living with her boyfriend in Allston, a neighborhood of Boston. How easily impressed I was back then—by a few years of age, by an apartment along Commonwealth Avenue, by a committed relationship the likes of which I could hardly imagine for myself.
When the other intern went off to attend to an errand (errands: something else that sounded preposterously grown up to me), I would rise and let my mind resettle on Mrs. Dalloway. I’d never known that a book could be about an ordinary woman on an ordinary day, and show us that no woman and no day can be ordinary. That summer, I decided to believe that everyone has a story, that no one could be written off as simply dull or idle, that characterizations could not be simple, that we all have this humming voice inside us, that we can all experience joy just from walking down the street.
I thought of Mrs. Dalloway walking through London, focusing her attention on everything around her—the shopkeepers and whirling young men and laughing girls and old dowagers—and how she loved it all with “an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it.”
And that’s what I told myself to do: simply be part of it, this life unfolding before me. That man wearing a suit climbing the steps to the Boston Public Library had the same heavy-footedness as my father, the swing of that young woman’s dress struck me as something like how I hoped to appear to others but knew I didn’t, the music of the busker set up outside of Trinity Church took on a rhythm that my high school boyfriend would have tapped his foot to. When I did this—observed the scene around me in Copley Plaza and tried to feel connected to it—I felt giddy, as if I’d stumbled upon a secret few have known. Mrs. Dalloway gave me this path to joy. In the first couple of pages, Mrs. Dalloway sums up all the things she loves: “life; London; this moment in June.” And so I would love it, too—my life, Boston, my own moment in June.
As August turned into September and another semester at Boston College began again, I tried to carry my revelations about Mrs. Dalloway with me day-by-day and semester-after-semester. But soon my self-conscious seriousness returned, the light-heartedness slipped away, and my mind returned to finding fault in others rather than benevolently observing. By senior year I’d fallen for other women of a different time period—obscure women writers from eighteenth century England.
I tried to get into a special seminar where I proposed to write a longer fictional work, a reimagining of a few of these women’s lives and their circle of friendship. The professor in charge of deciding who was accepted met with me on September 11, 2001, as students and faculty gathered around the campus TVs blaring the news. She suggested we go ahead with the meeting anyway, stating that life must go on.
In her office, the professor said my writing was derivative, that I was trying too hard to sound like Virginia Woolf, like Mrs. Dalloway in particular. This was a revelation to me. I was flattered that she recognized something of Mrs. Dalloway in my own prose, a choice I had not consciously made. Yet the impression that I was blatantly imitating Woolf was crushing. Because of the imitative nature of my work, the professor said she wouldn’t let me into the seminar.
I walked through campus to the library, to ‘my’ desk where I often sat and read. I would frequently gaze out the window, watching my classmates bound down the wide steps leading to lower campus. But that day I couldn’t pay attention to anything beyond my own skin, the ache of rejection, the accusation of copying, of not having anything original to say. This was the flip side of Clarissa’s joy-in-attentiveness, and I lived in that space for a long time.
Except for random snippets of memorized lines drifting into my consciousness now and then, I hadn’t deliberately thought about Mrs. Dalloway since that fateful meeting with my professor senior year. But after the birth of my second daughter, as I try to find ways to sink into sleep swiftly when my baby is quiet, I settle on conjuring moments from my life before my daughters, years spent in Boston, then London, West Virginia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Phoenix, and finally Adelaide, Australia. I think about the choices that led to those places, to those phases of my single life.
Dwelling on those times reminded me of Mrs. Dalloway, her own choices, disappointments, and justifications, and the way she managed to love it all regardless. I’ve turned to Mrs. Dalloway again to see if Woolf’s novel will still have that magical effect on me, or if that magic could only strike when I was young and easily enchanted. I’m no longer worried about imitating Woolf. By now, I believe I’ve developed my own voice, one that is most likely (I can only hope) influenced by Mrs. Dalloway, but not derivative of it.
I don’t reread Mrs. Dalloway in June, but December, the first month of summer in Australia. In this way, the months are congruous. I read aloud to my newborn on days when she has allowed me enough sleep to concentrate. When I am too exhausted to follow precisely I go back and reread, sometimes the same paragraph, over and over. Mainly I read aloud while sitting on my blue armchair, my baby lying in my lap, spread out on her blue boomerang pillow, breastfeeding and dozing intermittently. Her cheeks smell of her own saliva, and her breath is the chalky sweetness of my milk.
I read slowly, and then tell my daughter that I had always assumed I would have a defining summer like the one Clarissa recalls, a dramatic span that solidified my romantic choices. I never got my intense and romantic summer, but instead pursued a series of entanglements: a few lasting around a year, but most short and unfulfilling, where I was dropped wordlessly, without a trace. Such behavior left me reeling, wondering what it was about me that could prompt such abandon. All this until I moved to Adelaide, a long way from where I started, and met her father, a man who is capable and reserved, who lacks regrets or histrionics; which is to say, he is nothing like Clarissa’s Peter Walsh. In my twenties I was looking for the drama a man like Peter could provide. At thirty-seven, I’ve wised up. I don’t have that same fondness.
Even if I had the time, I’m no longer inclined to sit on the grass and listen to the buskers as I did at nineteen, to eat my sandwich and contemplate my connection to those around me, to wider humanity. I no longer wish to float on such abstractions, no longer see their utility. That part of my life is over, at least during this span focused on taking care of young children, one who is suddenly, inexplicably terrified of having water poured over her head in the bath, the other who wakes from her naps with a look of confused accusation, wondering how I was able to trick her into sleep once again.
Just as Clarissa recalls, “And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton,” I tell my sleeping daughter about walking on Jumeriah Beach in Dubai, Khalifa Street in Abu Dhabi, on Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona, on Rundle Mall in Adelaide. And I wonder when it was that my June days, all my days, became different than when I was nineteen. When it was that I settled into a way of being that is more content, less searching, not as concerned about how I should be. Because of this, Mrs. Dalloway’s effect is less shattering, less instructive. Then the spell is broken; my daughter cries—swaps drowsy for outrage—and the space for existential questions shrinks.
One day, too exhausted to read to her, I describe what I believe Mrs. Dalloway had taught me at nineteen, revelations I uncovered then, that have stayed with me, but have not been reignited. These are discoveries that sound banal and obvious when said aloud: that life is beautiful, that ordinary moments, such as hearing the tram’s ding, watching other women with baby strollers, listening to the sound of laughter from teenagers on a park bench, make up that beauty. That the distance between our internal and external selves can shrink when we, perversely, cast our attention fully outside of our own skin.
For all I’ve taken from Mrs. Dalloway, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that I’ve lost that sense of thrill from a journey into work, observing those I pass, imagining each day as a lark and a plunge. Yet as I finish Mrs. Dalloway, my biggest surprise is the way I can so clearly remember how moved I was then, and my certainty of how right I was to be moved. On every page I see how beautiful it is: this meditation on how we savor moments, how the past imbues our present at every turn, how multi-faceted we all are. But this time, Mrs. Dalloway’s effect on me is less mysterious. All the characters we meet are contemplating their existence as they go about their day, and in the evening, Septimus’ suicide brings all of that contemplation to a dark finality. The conjuring of how Woolf brought me to such revelations appears less like a conjuring now, and more ordinary. There is both relief and disappointment in this.
When I read the last lines of Mrs. Dalloway to my daughter—“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? [Peter] thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”—I see that young woman of nineteen sitting on the grass in Copley Square, desperately trying to take in the terror, the ecstasy and extraordinary excitement of those summer days in Boston. If only she could see me now, still reading Mrs. Dalloway, contemplating my connection, not to the man climbing the library steps or the woman in a dress that swings just so or the busker angling for spare change, but to her.
