This was the first Woolf I ever read, and it’s still a pleasure to re-read. I’d remembered some of the prose but forgotten some of the story and structure, the way that the narrative jumps from one character to another as their paths cross on a single day in London in June, 1923. I remembered the mood, the way that observations or impressions tie to past memories (even as Clarissa Dalloway thinks about the constant newness of life, too, how every one is “creating it every moment afresh”) and the way that life (especially city life) is so full of connections, some apparent, some invisible. Peter Walsh, who proposed to Clarissa when they were young, and who has recently returned from years away in India, thinks about how “to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter, even trees, or barns.”
I love the descriptions of the motion and variety of London, like this, from Clarissa’s walk to buy flowers near the beginning of the book:
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
Or this, from closer to the end of the book, when Peter Walsh is walking from his hotel to the Dalloways’ house in the evening:
It was not beauty pure and simple—Bedford Place leading to Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.
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