In June 1925, a month after the publication of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that the influential writer and critic Lytton Strachey had pronounced the substance of the novel ‘rather ordinary — or unimportant’. Other readers have made similar criticisms; the novelist Arnold Bennett, also in 1925, complained of its lack of plot and it is frequently dismissed as a trivial story about an upper-middle-class woman giving a party.
Responses of this kind do the novel an injustice. Even the apparently uneventful narrative of Clarissa Dalloway’s activities on 13 June 1923 provides a record of social change and political tensions in a nation shaken by war, an influenza pandemic and the weakening of empire. Septimus Smith’s tragic storyline, spiralling from mental health crisis to suicide in a matter of hours, is a powerful portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder and the human cost of war. The Britain Woolf shows us is a country in upheaval, its privileged elite and governing Conservative party on the verge of disintegration under pressure from modernisation and moves for a more egalitarian social order.
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