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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The novel, which was written in 1925, is set in London and deals with a day in Mrs. Dalloway's life. Clarissa Dalloway is followed from early morning, when she leaves her house in London to go out and order flowers for an evening party, to night, when the party takes place. As she goes through the day, her thoughts linger on different people and events, mainly on her husband Richard and on her daughter Elizabeth. Her mental activity is paralleled by that of Peter Walsh, the man Clarissa was in love when she was young, and who has come back to London after a long stay in India. In the afternoon Clarissa receives an unexpected visit form Peter, where both of them seem still to be attracted by each other, even if many years have passed. The novel ends with Clarissa’s party and Peter is among the guests. That evening he feels immediately troubled by Clarissa’s approach, though the writer does not tell us what happens next.
From part I: “For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say? - some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St James’s Park on a fine morning - indeed they did. But Peter - however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink - Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in the bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St James’s Park, still making out that she had been right-and she had to - not marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had born about her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish: and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that. Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably - silly, pretty, flimsy, nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her - perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.”
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