The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 June 2001
by Virginia Woolf
Those who live a self-examined life, have within them a constant dialogue between spiritual yearnings and the material practicality of everyday life. This dialogue is the primary narrative element of this excellent novel. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to host a party for her wealthy and powerful friends (her husband is a member of parliament). She takes a stroll and buys some flowers. She comes home to meet with Peter Walsh, a man she nearly married, and who has spent the past five years in imperial India. For his part, Peter is torn between his personal successes and failures in the eyes of London society. He also happens to be jealously in love with a married woman. Meanwhile, in a park across town, a young man, shell-shocked by World War 1, is teetering on the verge of a precipice. All of the characters have rich inner lives that Woolf brilliantly brings to life in a complex web of meandering thoughts, desires, and everyday occurrences. Will Peter declare his long lost love for Clarissa? Does her husband look upon his own life as a glowing success or a middle class muddle? Will young Septimus Smith get the sympathetic attention and care he so desperately needs? Just who is it who passes by on the street in an elegantly shrouded limousine? In this intricate book, Woolf created an immensely provocative view of modern life, love, and death in layers of London society. There are hopeful moments, warmly nostalgic ones, but also moments of dread and awful foreboding. Indeed, given Woolf's own untimely end, it is even hauntingly foreshadowing. The book will evoke the reader's sense of frustrated dreams and furtive plans. In the end, a complex, engaging, brilliant work, worthy of multiple readings.
Also by Virginia Woolf: [The London Scene] [To the Lighthouse] [Orlando]