I can’t quite believe it, but never in my time as an English major was I ever required to read Virginia Woolf. What? How is that possible? A review of my shelf of literature anthologies from college reveals that my British literature classes didn’t even break into the 19th century, let alone the 20th when Woolf was writing. Brief excerpts of a few works of hers appear in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and a collection called Modern Women’s Stories, both of which I picked up second hand for my own reading, not for a class. I spent much time on Modern American writers, but none whatsoever on British writers of the Modern period.

I know that I’ve read a fair number of good quotes by Woolf, and I did enjoy the movie The Hours which I knew was written after the writer read Mrs. Dalloway. And somewhere along life’s journey, perhaps a church rummage sale, I picked up a copy of Mrs. Dalloway for myself. I began reading it one night in bed, as I generally read books nowadays. I kept reading and reading through the lengthy, rambling sentences until I was getting too tired to comprehend it. I flipped ahead to see where the chapter might end, then realized with no small amount of confusion and exasperation that it did not. There were no chapters. Just one long train of thought the reader is to follow until the very end with no breaks whatsoever.

That’s fine and dandy and I was interested to see how she pulled it off, but I knew I could not read this book piecemeal in the evenings before bed. Having a full time job, a toddler, and other commitments, I put the book aside, thinking I would really not be able to do it justice for some time. But a weekend trip to Denver for a friend’s wedding proved the perfect opportunity. I would be traveling alone, would be on a total of four planes in three airports, and would be staying alone in my hotel room. So I popped Mrs. Dalloway into my purse and was off. I finished the book before I left the Denver airport and was left with nothing to read on the plane rides home. It was that quick of a read and that good. Fantastic. I feel mild irritation that I was deprived of Woolf’s writing during my college years and never took the time since to pick her up.

Woolf was raised in a very literary family and was obviously extremely intelligent. She had some college level education, including Greek, Latin, and German, and was an important part of literary, philosophical, and political circles in London. But her life was laced with loss and tragedy. She lost her mother and a half sister when she was in her teens, and she lost her father as a young woman. She and her sister Vanessa were sexually abused by two of their half brothers, and Virginia suffered many episodes of nervous breakdown, some which even left her institutionalized for a time.

Because of this combination of personal triumph and tragedy, she is an extremely sympathetic writer. In Mrs. Dalloway, her characters all have their flaws, but as a reader you understand why and you empathize with them. And she does this with absolutely no direct appeal to the reader to be understanding; it is all done strictly through telling this little detail and that little story so that the characters blaze to life on their own. Woolf’s hand is light and the reader is whisked from one character to the next in just one day.

Anyone who has seen The Hours is familiar enough with the general storyline. Clarissa Dalloway, a 50-something woman of means, is throwing a party. That’s it, really. It’s the day of the party and the reader sees preparations made, flowers bought, and a dress mended. But into this seemingly simple story intrude the innermost thoughts of a variety of characters, including Clarissa’s husband, her old flame, the best friend of her youth, her daughter, her daughter’s tutor, an unwanted guest, a man suffering from shell shock and his fretful young Italian wife, doctors, a duchess, and more.

With uncanny precision, Woolf tackles issues of class, politics, gender inequities, mental illness, medical malpractice, religion, faithfulness, and, most of all, love. All of these issues remain with us today in different forms, which is what makes this story one that lasts. I believe that is why The Hours was so successful. But even that very clever movie doesn’t come close to plumbing the depths of Mrs. Dalloway or the mind of Virginia Woolf.

Not only is her subject matter interesting, Woolf is an excellent writer. I marked many clauses, sentences, and whole paragraphs that impressed me. Here are a few so you can get a taste of her writing (and if you think this is too much, know that I found it hard to narrow it down to just these examples).

“How much she wanted it—that people should look pleased as she came in . . . half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew . . . for no one was ever for a second taken in.”

“Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing—so Peter Walsh did now.”

“Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.”

“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the great tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know to a title what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning!”

“The compensation of growing old . . . was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

“Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

“Every man fell in love with her, and she was really awfully bored.”

“Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.”

“As she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind like a bird, falling from branch to branch.”

“How odd it was to know him and yet not know a single thing that had happened to him.”

Woolf does an admirable job making the reader feel the environment, the light, the breeze, the crowds, the sounds. She takes us through the day, seamlessly moving us from the fresh, promising morning to the bustling and shifting afternoon, to the enchanted but anxious evening. Following are examples.

The morning:
“Everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats . . . wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run.”

The afternoon:
“A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of mountainous white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off with a hatchet, with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure gardens, on their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the world, there was a perpetual movement among them. . . . and in spite of the grave fixity, the accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the earth, now darkness.”

The evening:
“Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned . . . I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”

While Virginia Woolf is obviously fond of punctuation, particularly commas and semicolons, I don’t begrudge her the markings. With her long sentences the commas and semicolons act rather like nails holding together a structure built of clauses; without them, the entire sentence would be in jeopardy of collapsing under its own weight. And anyway, once you get in the spirit of the stream of words, you hardly notice the punctuation anymore.

After reading Mrs. Dalloway I count myself a fan of Virginia Woolf and will be on the lookout for more of her works in used book stores and rummage sales.