‘Mrs. Dalloway’: Virginia Woolf’s Midlife-Crisis Novel

Mrs. Dalloway at all times had grey hair. She first seems in Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915)—trilling, ladylike, usually imperious, and searching “like an eighteenth-century masterpiece,” with a pink face and “hair turning gray.” She doesn’t appear to age or regress between The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, which was printed 10 years later and is now celebrating its one hundredth anniversary. In that novel, her hair is tinged the identical shade, and she or he has “a contact of the chicken about her, of the jay, blue-green, gentle, vivacious.” Then the kicker: “although she was over fifty.”Discover the September 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this situation and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreThe novel’s centennial has occasioned a flurry of occasions and new editions, however not as a lot consideration of what I might argue is essentially the most enduring and private theme of the work: It’s a masterpiece of midlife disaster. Woolf was 40 when she started writing the novel, a decade youthful than her protagonist however within the midst of what she known as her personal “center age.” As she chronicled in her crackling, astute diary, it was a second to weigh what one has made and may make of a life.For Woolf, it ignited a inventive fireplace. In the summertime of 1923, about midway by way of her work on Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote, “My idea is that at 40 one both will increase the tempo or slows down. Evidently which I need.” She went on to catalog her intensive ongoing initiatives, together with an essay on Chaucer, the revision of a slew of outdated essays, and what she termed “ ‘severe’ studying.” And all of this got here throughout a sustained burst of fiction writing that Woolf—whose work had been derailed by psychological breakdowns and spells of sickness—relished. From the autumn of 1922 by way of 1924, she received Mrs. Dalloway on paper at a livid charge; in doing so, she reckoned with the incongruity of center age as she lived it.The defining characteristic of midlife is its formlessness. It takes the form of what it’s not—not youth, not outdated age. (Is 40 outdated or younger? How about 50?) But it’s a section of huge transformation: for some an interlude of welcome stability through which they’ll take inventory, for others a time to take new dangers. It doesn’t need for literary examples—the work of current fiction writers together with Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, and Miranda July, for instance, revolves round girls reflecting on their selections halfway by way of life. In content material, if not in model, all of them owe one thing to Mrs. Dalloway.From the June 2024 situation: Miranda July’s female-midlife-crisis novelThe novel’s opening—with its well-known first line, “Mrs. Dalloway mentioned she would purchase the flowers herself”—is itself a sort of center. It launches the reader into Clarissa Dalloway’s morning, into “life; London; this second of June.” Early on a Wednesday in 1923, within the shadow of the Nice Struggle and an influenza pandemic, Clarissa is shopping for these flowers for a celebration she is throwing that night. The remainder of the novel follows a number of characters in a collection of streams of consciousness: Clarissa as she experiences the unfolding hours and prepares for her visitors; her former lover, Peter Walsh, who wonders whether or not he can think about his life successful; a World Struggle I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith, who’s shortly descending into shell-shock-triggered insanity; and quite a lot of different Londoners. Over the course of that single June day, they ponder each other, their world, and their locations in it.Virginia Woolf in 1924, at age 42 (Tremendous Artwork Photographs / Heritage Photographs / Getty)Clarissa, the spouse of a member of Parliament, has chosen a cushty existence and a secure accomplice—maybe on the expense of journey. However she was as soon as an nearly wayward lady, tempted to marry Peter and embark on a extra unorthodox course. She ponders all of this as she strikes by way of her busy day, mentally lurching ahead and backward in time. And as she does so, she considers her actions in gentle of her age. When she walks to purchase the flowers, as an illustration, she asserts that “she felt very younger; on the similar time unspeakably aged.” Peter unexpectedly comes to go to after years in India, touching off a torrent of fascinated with whether or not she is previous her prime: “It was throughout for her,” she thinks. “The sheet was stretched and the mattress slender.” And as she readies herself and her home for the social gathering that night,she had a sudden spasm, as if, whereas she mused, the icy claws had had the possibility to repair in her. She was not outdated but. She had simply damaged into her fifty-second yr. Months and months of it had been nonetheless untouched. June, July, August! Every nonetheless remained nearly entire.Age’s attendant regrets and hopes have spurred a disaster inside Clarissa.It’s additionally extremely believable that she has entered menopause, or what Woolf later termed in her diary “T of L” (for “Time of Life”). Clarissa has not too long ago been in poor health, however in deflecting the point out of a pal’s “girls’s illnesses,” she makes clear that no matter hormonal flux is or isn’t taking place, this isn’t a topic she’ll talk about. She is the best age for it, and she or he does see herself as “shrivelled, aged, breastless.” What may extra readily carry a couple of disaster of identification than the bodily alteration of the physique, the change from bearer of life to barren lady?Clarissa’s extra existential concern is one which events so many midlife crises—that at 51, she has missed out on some superior array of experiences; that one other path would have led to a brisker, happier variant of herself. Woolf’s trademark stream of consciousness, her fast and seamless strikes from one character or expertise to a different, signifies that the previous, current, and future intertwine as if no barrier separates them. And so Clarissa doesn’t ponder her previous a lot as transfer by way of it. The touchstones of her youth—a kiss from her insouciant pal Sally Seton, a transcendent night spent on the terrace of a rustic home, her close to engagement to Peter—are as alive to her because the mending she does that morning or the lonesome demise she imagines for herself in outdated age.From the April 2023 situation: Trying to find Virginia Woolf on the Isle of SkyeThat aliveness and sense of immediacy are what animate Woolf’s prose—and her heroine. Clarissa finally basks within the unmitigated pleasure “that at some point ought to comply with one other; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one ought to get up within the morning; see the sky; stroll within the park.” Her reminiscences, she tells herself, are largely good. Because the day progresses, she thinks that “center age,” at the least for her, is “mediocrity,” however then summons her internal knowledge and can to power “herself along with her indomitable vitality to place all that apart.” The core of the novel is Clarissa’s realization that life is going on within the current tense, and so that’s the place she should be.Mrs. Dalloway was written at a private turning level for Woolf, too. She moved in early 1924 from a Georgian brick pile within the suburbs of Richmond to a townhouse within the bustling London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, the place her social calendar usually outpaced her. She had initially gone to Richmond for the quiet and relaxation that her medical doctors and husband insisted she wanted. That’s, till Woolf started a marketing campaign to maneuver again to London correct, the place, she wrote, she might “dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy.” London was one in every of her nice loves, and the observations in Mrs. Dalloway of its vibrant ambiance had been Woolf’s as nicely. The change of surroundings freed the writer to rattle herself within the service of her artwork and, regardless of persevering with to query her skills, lastly declare satisfaction in her fiction. Though she would reside solely 17 years extra, committing suicide in 1941, this was the start of Woolf’s center age. It was a season of fruitfulness earlier than she succumbed to the psychological sickness that had stalked her—a interval through which she produced her most profound work.Learn: The nice novel of the web was printed in 1925The pleasure she present in London—within the motion of our bodies on the sidewalk, the towering spire of St. Pancras Church—and due to this fact in life, was so potent as a result of it solid her internal darkness in aid. Woolf, who had endured the deaths of siblings and each mother and father, who had been confined to mattress on a milk-and-meat weight loss program throughout a number of breakdowns, was decided, particularly in Mrs. Dalloway, to put life subsequent to demise, to encompass midlife with the scrumptious pleasures of each youth and maturity.For one temporary interval, and in a single magnificent, enduring novel, life emerged the victor. A couple of yr and a half into writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf encountered a harmful anniversary, that of her mom’s demise in 1895, which had occasioned immense misery in 13-year-old Woolf. But on today, she shook off her malaise and wrote, “However sufficient of demise—its [sic] life that issues.” That day, she recalled how even the best chore, weeding, had earlier despatched her into matches of ecstasy, describing “how the quiet lapped me spherical” after which “how the wonder brimmed over me & steeped my nerves until they quivered.” Clarissa finds herself in an identical second at her social gathering: Demise has proven up on her doorstep within the type of the information {that a} younger man—Septimus Smith—has thrown himself from a window and died. “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the course of my social gathering, right here’s demise.” However then she steps into the popularity that, regardless of the choices she’s made, or maybe due to them, “she had by no means been so joyful. Nothing could possibly be gradual sufficient; nothing final too lengthy.”From the April 1939 situation: Virginia Woolf on the artwork of biographyThe clock strikes, the social gathering begins to disperse, the outdated woman throughout the road seems her gentle for mattress, and Clarissa Dalloway notes, “What a unprecedented night time!” What a unprecedented day.*Lead picture sources: Sasha / Hulton Archive / Getty; Olga Korneeva / GettyThis article seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “Mrs. Dalloway’s Midlife Disaster.”​If you purchase a ebook utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.