Considered Virginia Woolf’s greatest novel, Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post-World War I England. As she is preoccupied with the last-minute details of dinner party, Clarissa is flooded with remembrances of the past, in the process reexamining the choices she has made, as well as looking toward old age. Written in a stream of consciousness style, Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most important novels in literature.
In this deeply personal volume, Robin Black writes about Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a book she returned to again and again when she began writing at nearly forty and found herself gaining a sense of emotional stability for the first time in her life. For two decades, Mrs. Dalloway has been Black’s partner in a crucial, ongoing conversation about writing and about the emotional life. Now, Black takes a deep dive into both the craft of the book, what a writer might learn from its mechanics, and also into the humanity to be found on every page.
“At fifty-nine, I am now the age Virginia Woolf was when she took that final, heavy-pocketed walk into The River Ouse. I am the age at which she killed herself, and I am not going to kill myself; but I was by no means always sure of that.”
Jeffrey Condran recently spoke with Robin Black about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Bookmarked (Ig Publishing), and her abiding connection to and fascination with Woolf’s classic.
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Jeffrey Condran: Many people feel a connection to Virginia Woolf because of her well-documented life rather than because they’re familiar with her writing. Having admired Woolf as a person and written so closely about her fiction, what do you think of this phenomenon?
Robin Black: First, thank you so much for this interview! I very much appreciate your turning your attention to this book.
As for the question, I think I idolized Woolf more than I admired her, and now I admire her more than idolize her. The distinction is worth making, because idolizing a distant figure has this kind of blurry haze to it, or maybe more like a blinding light – in large part, for me, the light of her brilliance. As I’ve grown older myself (at sixty I’m now older than she ever got to be) I am less inclined to idolize anyone for their intellect — or envy them, as I did her. But as I write in my book, in my youth, I wanted her brilliance more than I didn’t want her mental illness, so I more or less ignored her illness and her fate. I thought that having her mind meant only having her genius and that being a genius meant being happy. I had no capacity to put that genius of hers together with her struggles and see her as a whole person. Now that I have that capacity, I do admire her more than I idolize her. And I think my journey with Mrs. Dalloway has been analogous in some ways, in that after a year of very close reading, I am able to synthesize some of its more challenging aspects into the whole and not feel quite so precious about needing it to be a “perfect” book – which is itself a fantasy, as is the notion of intellect as somehow distinct from all other aspects of a person, or, far that matter, of intellect being anyone’s defining quality.
JC: One of the things I most admired about your book was its combination of memoir, literary analysis, and craft discussion. One moment of particular interest was your feeling that part of what inspired you about Mrs. Dalloway was that it created imaginative space for the reader to participate in making meaning in the novel. With this in mind, could you talk about what you mean when you say your “goal is to write for the second reading of the work?”
RB: Mrs. Dalloway presents us with two related miracles. The first is the individual miracle of Woolf creating this work of art. The second is the more universal miracle that anyone who reads it can enter into a collaboration with Virginia Woolf, the result of which is a unique version of Mrs. Dalloway particular to that collaboration. More and more, I think that the true knock-you-over miracle of all art happens after its creation and in its reception — even when its reception is less than positive. Even when a reader of my own hates one of my characters, even a character I love, it’s thrilling. Because that character is real to someone else. How is that not a miracle? For us all. In my book, I describe this as a reader freeing an author’s imagination from its “inky captivity” on the page, freeing it with their own imagination in which a new version is born, and this is one of these phenomena of art where the more I think about it, the more incredible I find the process to be.
But I had to laugh when I read that quotation of mine, about the second reading, because honestly I think that has less to do with miracles, less to do with anything as grand as any of this, and more to do with my wanting careful readers who go back to my work to unearth my strategies and my craft decisions, so they can understand how intentionally I wrote the thing. In other words, I think that may just be me wanting someone to see how hard I worked. Less about collaboration, more about wanting admiration – so maybe not my most elevated wish.
JC: It’s difficult to talk about Mrs. Dalloway or any of Woolf’s fiction without mentioning stream of consciousness. When I think of stream of consciousness, I think of a literary technique that, to the degree possible, mimics the way that consciousness appears to us in our lives. Certainly not linear, but seemingly based on touchstones that trigger ideas and images. Those famous “moments of being.” Your discussion of stream of consciousness, however, seems to add a kind of ur-consciousness, a moment where many minds are pushed to the same intellectual space. How did you come to this interesting idea?
RB: At a young age, through an experience of sudden cold that I describe in the book, I became fascinated by the fact that at certain moments everyone in the situation is likely having the exact same thought. For example, if an airplane takes a plunge, everyone on that plane will all be thinking “Oh, no!” or some closely related, less tame version. When a city’s lights all go out, one million people might have a shared thought. It happens when an entire audience laughs at a joke. And obviously, I’m not saying that every individual thought is identical, but that there is overlap, particularly with physical discomfort, or fear, or surprise, and that we live with this every day.
I believe that Woolf uses this species of overlap especially well in Mrs. Dalloway to represent the trauma of World War I – then known as The Great War. There is a passage that culminates with this line: “. . . for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. . .” It isn’t a specific character thinking these thoughts, it’s everyone. All. The national trauma of war has produced an overlapping, shared national consciousness.
I haven’t yet plumbed the full depths of what I think Woolf was doing with this, or why she felt that this sense of shared consciousness was so important, but she also uses its absence as a way to describe the sensation of Septimus’s mental illness, widely recognized to be modeled on her own. In scenes in which “everyone” is thinking the same thing about a passing car, then an airplane, Septimus alone thinks something entirely different. So there’s a way in which Woolf conflates the notion of shared consciousness with that of shared understanding, and with “sanity.” The person unable to participate is the one in pain, the one with mental illness. And through Septimus’s struggles, war-related PTSD as we’d term it now, she points a blaming finger at the same national consciousness that seems — seems — to represent shared mental health.
As with all things Woolf, it’s complicated and not entirely consistent, but there’s little question in my mind that, for her, consciousness meant more than just one person having distinct individual thoughts – though clearly it also meant that.
JC: In your chapter, “Her Lark, His Plunge,” you make a symbolic/metaphorical connection between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, arguing that they operate as “doubles,” and that this move by Woolf has a profound influence on the structure of the novel. Could you discuss how this influence works?
RB: That doubling, which is one of the very few aspects of Mrs. Dalloway on which Woolf publicly commented, accomplishes many things in the book, but all of them depend on one central fact: Because the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus is not interactional or relational, but is instead symbolic, the book defines itself as being largely reliant on a reader’s interpretive involvement.
All fiction is reliant on that to some extent, but not all fiction is structured primarily around a scaffold that requires a reader to start with such questions as: What is this character even doing in this book? Why is there a “shell shocked” veteran of the Great War on these pages at all? The inevitability of these questions means that a reader, from very early on, has a mystery to solve that for pretty much the entire length of the book, has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with the realm of symbolic interpretation.
In my book, I describe Mrs. Dalloway as both relying on interpretation to be understood and defying definitive interpretation. I think that tension – which is also an odd kind of authorial generosity – is part of what makes the novel so extraordinary, and central to that is the mysterious presence of Septimus.
It’s worth noting too that he was a relatively late addition. She had written the novel – originally called The Hours – without any such figure. And it’s interesting to me that the “new” title focuses a reader firmly on Clarissa, a shift that makes Septimus’s role in the book even more mysterious than it would be were the title still The Hours, a title that could encompass them both. In my view, Woolf went to extraordinary lengths to engage her readers in interpretation, therefore making them maximally active participants in the novel.
JC: You also spend time discussing the ways that Virginia Woolf avoids positioning motherhood as the central feature of Clarissa Dalloway’s life. She is a mother, but on this particular day, the day of the party she’s giving, the thoughts and emotions that drive the novel are rarely focused on her daughter, Elizabeth. When thinking about modern versions of this idea, I always seem to come back to Ayelet Waldman’s Modern Love piece in the New York Times titled “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” and later, her book Bad Mother, where she says, “I love my husband more than I love my children.” It reignited a debate about what was good, right, or even “normal” for mothers to feel. And while Clarissa is not so enamored of Richard as Waldman seems to be of Michael Chabon, it does somewhat famously compel the reader to see Clarissa outside of the supposed norms of Edwardian motherhood. It is only one of the groundbreaking moves Woolf made in Mrs. Dalloway. What about this made you dedicate the chapter “Obscuring the Juggernaut” to the issue?
RB: In a funny way, it was envy. Woolf wrote a novel about a woman who is a mother that is not a novel about being a mother. I have never been able to write a story about a woman who is a mother without having motherhood loom large. And I’m not saying that was always my intention, to avoid it looming large, and that I failed. I’m just saying that my experience is that once a woman in fiction has children, people tend to see her through her through that lens — to an extraordinary degree. And also through the lens of their own idealization of what a mother should be.
So really for my own education as a writer, I wanted to look at how Woolf did this, and the answer turned out to be really interesting to me. She bats the subject away in myriad ways, including having very few women in the book who have living children; consistently associating Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth with her Dalloway (paternal) lineage, rather than with Clarissa herself; keeping Elizabeth out of Clarissa’s thoughts to a notable degree.
And in the end this all may be related to Woolf not having been a parent, while I have been one now for most of my life. The subject may just naturally have receded for her and may naturally emerge for me. But through looking at this phenomenon in Mrs. Dalloway, I have learned some ways to change that, should I ever want to.
And of course, it is all personal. In that chapter, I tie the literary “juggernaut” of motherhood to how, when I was a stay-at-home mother, I felt I was viewed as though motherhood defined every aspect of my being. So, as with the rest of my book, I discovered links between an aspect of what has drawn me to Mrs. Dalloway, aspects of craft, and then aspects of my own personal history.
JC: Virginia Woolf is a figure about which many people have strong opinions. Like Jane Austen, there is almost a cultural industry that has developed around her work. What kind of feedback have you received about your book?
RB: I imagine there are some Dalloway devotees who have been kindly silent on the subject. I have gotten little pieces of pushback on specific points. For example, not everyone agrees with me that Peter is emotionally abusive to Clarissa. Some see him as the better alternative to Richard, the one who got away. (My own view is that what really got away was Clarissa’s chance to explore her own preferences, romantic and sexual, maybe even professional.) The truth is, I have been very shy about the book. Every once in a while, a friend will tell me about some Dalloway group to which I should be introducing the volume, and I haven’t done any of that. I’m perhaps overly conscious of not being a Woolf scholar, and of this being a book that is primarily about reading and writing, the idiosyncratic interaction of one woman and one book. Though I should add, the book was reviewed in the most wonderful way by Robin Lippincott, author of the novella, Mr. Dalloway, and the fact that he is a “Dalloway person” made his appreciation of my work all the more meaningful to me.
JC: What’s next for Robin Black?
Thank you for asking. I am slowly adding to a story collection, and I am working on something that started life as a memoir but that I think – for many reasons – is going to be a novel, eventually. I am also doing a lot of painting and drawing, which I’ve been taking more seriously the past few years. I found it impossible to write fiction during the height of the pandemic, my imagination was too busy trying to imagine what life itself held, but I am back to it, and grateful to be. As I am also grateful for your extremely thoughtful questions, here.
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Robin Black’s story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. Her novel, Life Drawing was longlisted for multiple awards, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, among others. An essay collection, Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide came out in 2016, followed now by the harder to categorize, memoirish conversation with a book, Mrs. Dalloway, Bookmarked (Ig Publishing, 2022). Robin, who has taught most recently in the Rutgers Camden MFA Program for Writers, lives in Philadelphia with her husband.
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Jeffrey Condran is the author of the novel, Prague Summer, and two story collections, A Fingerprint Repeated and Claire, Wading Into the Danube By Night. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is the co-founder/publisher of the independent literary press, Braddock Avenue Books.