Mrs Dalloway

The test is subtractive, and it finds very little to take. The two strands are the argument: without Septimus the party is a comedy of manners, and without Clarissa his death is a case history. What looks detachable is mostly load-bearing. Lady Bruton’s luncheon, where she has a letter to the Times on emigration to Canada composed for her, is Bradshaw’s Proportion practised as policy. Miss Kilman’s afternoon with Elizabeth gives Clarissa her hated double and the next generation its one free ride, Elizabeth on an omnibus up the Strand. Even the ambulance that passes Peter carries Septimus’s body. What holds the axis below 9.0: Peter’s memory of Bourton returns to the same refusals more often than it needs; his dream of the solitary traveller, fine in itself, could go without the book losing a joint; and the satire of Hugh Whitbread runs longer than its point.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A society’s ordinary day is built over its war dead, and the institutions that keep it sane enforce their sanity by force. Sir William Bradshaw prescribes rest and separation, and to Clarissa he is a man “forcing your soul”. The novel names the two goddesses he serves, Proportion and Conversion, and shows the shell-shocked clerk’s madness as a truer report of the war than the city’s composure. A second truth lies beside it: the self is spread among other people and places, and the price of a married public life is invisibility, “not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway”. A third comes at the close: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate”. These are meanings, not moods. Held off the top because Bradshaw and Kilman are drawn with animus, so the disclosure about institutions is partly caricature, and the class of the party is inhabited more than examined.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Height comes often, and in a quiet register. The first page rises at once, a June morning at Bourton remembered as a plunge: “What a lark! What a plunge!” Big Ben gives the book its recurring height, the hour struck and its sound spreading over the city. Septimus in Regent’s Park, where the trees are alive and the dead Evans walks behind the railings, is visionary and dreadful at once. The summit is the late afternoon in the Smiths’ room: Rezia trimming a hat, Septimus helping and laughing, sane for an hour, then Holmes on the stairs and the leap. At night Clarissa in the little room watches the old lady opposite going to bed while the clock strikes, and the close lands on Peter’s terror and ecstasy. Held below 9.0 because the middle of the book, from Peter’s walk to the luncheon, runs level.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The central structure is built, not evoked. Septimus is the scapegoat whose death the party absorbs: Clarissa, who “felt somehow very like him”, feels through his death the life she would not throw away, and says so: “She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” The two never meet. The doubling is carried by the book’s architecture and by one line of Shakespeare, the dirge from Cymbeline, which passes from her in the morning to him in the afternoon. Cymbeline is a play of a death feigned and a return, and the novel uses its shape: the hostess goes down into a little room and comes back to her guests. Septimus is also the mad prophet, who must tell the Prime Minister that “men must not cut down trees”. Around this core the archetypes are evoked rather than built: the old woman singing by Regent’s Park station, Peter’s solitary traveller. Of the five summit gates it stands nearest the bar.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the Edwardian novel of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, the novel of houses, incomes and careers that Woolf attacked in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), with James, Conrad and Proust behind it. The turn is a novel of one day without chapters, passing from mind to mind on the occasion of a motor car, an aeroplane writing letters in the sky or a clock, with a past dug out behind each person to meet in the present, and two protagonists joined by nothing in the plot. The stake was real but limited: Woolf owned her press, so no editor could refuse her, and Jacob’s Room (1922) had already broken with the realist form. Above all, Ulysses (1922) had made the single day and the city’s crossing minds a form, and Woolf read it while she wrote. The swerve is her own, the tunnelled past, the double who never meets, the sentence that crosses minds without a seam, but it is not the first break.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel knows that lives which never touch are bound, and only the form can say it: the plot never brings Clarissa and Septimus into one room, so the bond is made by the clocks, by the motor car both wonder at, by the aeroplane the whole park reads, by the line of Shakespeare that passes between them, and by the news that comes to the party with Bradshaw. Told in chapters, by one narrator or over a longer span, the book would be two stories and a coincidence. The single day is the argument about time: the hours are “irrevocable”, the past is present only as memory behind each person, and the party is the day’s one act of making. The free indirect style, crossing within a page from Clarissa to Peter to Rezia to a stranger in the street, is the instrument of the claim that the self lives in others. Held just off the top because the long Bourton retrospect in Peter’s strand loosens the form toward the conventional flashback.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: a century of reading has not exhausted the book, and each generation has found a different one in it. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) is a reading of it at the length of a novel. The text holds its questions open: whether the party is Clarissa’s triumph or her evasion; whether her kinship with Septimus is understanding or appropriation; whether Sally Seton’s kiss, “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”, is the book’s suppressed centre; whether Richard, who cannot say that he loves her and brings roses instead, is its failure or its quiet good; what Peter’s terror at the end is terror of. The form yields as the questions do: the clock times, the echoes and the transitions repay counting. Held below the top because the book is short, and some of its lines are well worn.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The field is the English novel of the early twentieth century, and with it the European modernist novel. The intrinsic force: the book made the free indirect style a means of moving across a city’s minds with no narrator’s frame, made a single day carry a whole life by the past dug out behind each person, and set the private mind and the public wound, the war, the doctors and the state, in one structure without a plot to join them. What holds it below the top: Ulysses made the novel of the day first and at larger scale, and Woolf’s own To the Lighthouse and The Waves carry the method further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became, beside Ulysses, the type of the modernist novel of one day; Cunningham’s The Hours (1998, filmed in 2002) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) take it as their model; its multiple focalisation is now a plain technique of the novel; and some of that reach is Woolf’s, credited across her books more than to this one.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival is weighed over a hundred and one years. Form: the text survives whole, as published in 1925, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: continuous for a century. The book has been in print throughout, is taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, is translated into most written languages, and has been filmed, by Marleen Gorris in 1997 with Vanessa Redgrave, and rewritten, as The Hours. Its standing rose after Woolf’s death and again from the 1970s. Its surface is fixed to one class, one year and one city, the party and the Prime Minister’s car, but the war’s aftermath and the coercions of psychiatry it describes have outlived those conditions and are read for themselves. Held below the widest presence, which belongs to the few books of its century read without exception, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is near complete, and the making bears weight. The sentence is long and semicoloned, gathering clauses as the mind gathers them, turning in a breath from a flower shop to Bourton thirty years before; and short when it must be: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The transitions carry the book: the motor car in Bond Street passes from mind to mind along the street; the aeroplane’s letters are read by a dozen people, each differently; the clock strikes and the narrative crosses London on the sound, and Big Ben’s sentence returns, varied, so that the reader hears the day pass. Detail carries meaning: Rezia’s hat, Peter’s pocket-knife, Richard’s roses, Clarissa mending her green dress. Charged: the portraits of Kilman and Bradshaw slip into the narrator’s own contempt, and the prose there loses its tact; and some phrases, the plunge among them, are repeated until they wear.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Hugh Whitbread choosing a necklace and helping Lady Bruton with her letter, and Septimus watching the dead Evans among the trees. One law governs both: the soul’s privacy against the forces that would convert it, and the moment against the irrevocable hour. The comedy of the luncheon and the madness in the park are the same coercion seen at two distances; the party and the suicide are the same act, an offering, read from two sides. The range is wide and held: social comedy, a marriage, a lost love, a war neurosis, a death, a daughter’s freedom, an old woman’s song. Charged: the narrator’s essay on Proportion and Conversion steps outside the free indirect law the book otherwise keeps and speaks in the author’s own anger, and Kilman is seen from outside with a cruelty the book does not elsewhere allow.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Many orders, held in one day rather than listed. Consciousness, in a dozen minds and two at depth. The family: the Dalloways’ marriage and their daughter, Septimus and Rezia. The state: Richard in Parliament, the Prime Minister at the party, Lady Bruton’s scheme of emigration. Empire, in Peter’s India. War, in Septimus and the dead Evans, five years on. Medicine and the institutions of sanity, in Holmes and Bradshaw. Class, in Kilman’s poverty and resentment, Rezia’s lodging and the crowd at the palace gates. Religion, in Kilman’s conversion and Clarissa’s atheism. Sexuality, in Sally, Peter and the unspoken. The city, the park and the June weather; time and death over all. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the book’s size and vantage: labour is barely present, the state is glimpsed through a car window and at a party, and history is a ground rather than an agent.

Score: 8.6 / 10