Merve Emre - The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

OTHER ANNOTATED BOOKS FROM W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll, edited with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner

The Annotated Wizard of Oz

by L. Frank Baum, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Patrick Hearn

The Annotated Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Patrick Hearn

The Annotated Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens, edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Patrick Hearn

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes I, II, and III

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with an introduction by John LeCarr, edited with a preface and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales

edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

The Annotated Brothers Grimm

by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, with an introduction by A. S. Byatt, edited with a preface and notes by Maria Tatar

The Annotated Hunting of the Snark

by Lewis Carroll, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik, edited with notes by Martin Gardner

The Annotated Uncle Toms Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited with an introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

translated by Maria Tatar and Julie Allen, with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

The Annotated Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett, edited with an introduction and notes by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

The New Annotated Dracula

by Bram Stoker, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, edited with a preface and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated Wind in the Willows

by Kenneth Grahame, with an introduction by Brian Jacques, edited with a preface and notes by Annie Gauger

The Annotated Peter Pan

by J. M. Barrie, edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

with an introduction by Alan Moore, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The New Annotated Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley, with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro and an afterword by Anne K. Mellor, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

The Annotated African American Folktales

edited with a foreword, introduction, and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham

with an introduction by Victor LaValle, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger

Virginia Woolf outdoors at Garsington, smoking, June 1923. (Virginia Woolf Monks House photographs, MS Thr 564, [67]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.)

To DD

Virginia Woolf, black-and-white photograph of portrait painted by Vanessa Bell, 1934. (Monks House photographs, MS Thr 564, [77]. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library)

CONTENTS

Virginia Woolf, photographed by Man Ray, 1935. (Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy)

I.

V IRGINIA W OOLF S Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, traces a single summer day in the lives of two people whose paths never cross: Clarissa Dalloway, just over fifty, elegant, charming, and self-possessed, the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative member of Parliament; and Septimus Warren Smith, a solitary ex-soldier, a prophetic man haunted by visions he cannot explain to his anguished wife Lucrezia. Clarissa spends the day preparing for the party she will give later that nightbuying flowers, managing servants, mending a dress, and receiving her old suitor, Peter Walsh, whose sudden reappearance in her life recalls her to the passion and freedom of their youth. While she and Peter reminisce, Septimus is in Regents Park hallucinating. Given to thoughts of suicide, he visits an unsympathetic doctor at his wifes insistence. He throws himself from a window in the early evening, and several hours later, word that a young man had killed himself reaches Clarissa at her party.

Clarissa observes her guests and sees that they are oblivious to the disaster, the disgrace of death. She walks into an empty room, and in a moment of astonishing reverie, considers what her life has beenwhat any life must be: the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, ones parents giving it into ones hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Against this fear, her love of life rushes from her with a sense of triumph, with the rapture of existencethe sheer joy of being alive to experience all that the world still has to offer someone like her. She returns to her party, where Peter Walsh waits, eager to see her for the second time that day. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? She enters the room. It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. The novel ends.

II.

I READ Mrs. Dalloway for the first time when I was maybe ten or eleven, too young to make much sense of it. It was summer. I was away from home, though I cannot recall where or why exactlyonly that the mornings spread upon a countryside very green and bright, and that the days were hot, and longer than one felt they had any right to be. What I do remember, with a clarity that startles me, is a letter I received and opened with excitement, a letter I kept for many years. It was written on a sheet of paper torn from a composition notebook, with obvious care taken not to jag the edges. The writer was a friend from school, a boy to whom I had mailed my copy of Mrs. Dalloway after I finished so he could read it too. With the novel, I must have enclosed a letter of my own offering him some explanation, some insistence that he not only read Mrs. Dalloway but read my copy of it, and see something of us reflected in the pages I had annotatedmost likely, the scenes about being young and half in love. Once he had read it, he was indignant and excited. You were wrong, he wrote. Were not Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Walsh. We are Jake Barnes and Lady Ashley from The Sun Also Rises by one Ernest Hemingway. Dont jump to conclusions halfway through. Read the book to the end... the very end.

The self-seriousness of this exchange has been leveled by time, by the sheepishness and irony that this absurdly heady flirtation now summons. Reading the letter today, I feel embarrassed on behalf of our younger selves, for whatever childish misunderstanding had led us to believe that our relationship was well represented by either Clarissa and Peter, the repressed upper-class English wife and the dull, mawkish civil servant she refused to marry, or Lady Bret Ashley and Jake Barnes, the sexually liberated English divorcee and the impotent American journalist she loved too much to shake loose. Yet I confess to feeling some distant admiration for the readers we had been. I believe we had intuited something essential about novels, and about