Love between women comes from age with 'Mrs Dalloway'

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Ruth vanita 6 min Read 29 Jun 2025, 08:00 AM ist Natascha Mcelhone and Lena Heady in ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (1997). Summary at 100, the classic remains of Virginia Woolf, is an exciting original – both in its style and portrayal of female sexuality a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway published, my favorite of all her novels. Since the English novels only appeared in the 18th century, many of them have been named after women – Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about love and faithfulness. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life a woman was. Mrs Dalloway packs his striking originality in less than 64,000 words. James Joyce’s Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing special happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf likes to do, in the afternoon she rests, and that evening she has a party. Mrs Dalloway is not about events. It reveals the horrors of war and the self -interest and selfishness of colonial bureaucrats, but the concern is about the pain and pleasure of individuals. It’s about how we live just as much in memory and imagination as in a home or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to old friends, in two dimensions – the past and the present. She has a peaceful and loving marriage, but she likes to remember Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything “unbearable”. Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because, with wisdom that was striking in a young woman, that “a small license, she must be a little independence between people living in the same house day in the day”. This is a sentiment that everyone who has been married for years would understand. This is also one that the great heroines of the English comedy, from Shakespeare’s Rosalind to Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, would certainly agree. A few pages after the novel, Clarissa, with a little guilt towards her friendly and thoughtful husband, thinks about her lack of erotic warmth towards men, her ‘cold spirit’, on which Peter also commented. However, she knows that she felt “what men felt”. In an extraordinary passage, Woolf describes female desire in a way that evokes orgasm, specifically femal orgasm: “It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the Farthest and there quite the world come closer, Swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and struggling with an extraordinary relief about the cracks and sores. Detail. unconventional behavior. Initially, Clarissa thinks she can’t feel her old emotions again, but when she pulls out and dresses again, the feeling begins to return to her. As a young girl, dressing up to meet Sally, she felt, as Othello felt when he met his wife: ‘If it is now to die,’ there is the best now. “When she and Sally walked together at night, Clarissa recalled” the most beautiful moment of her entire life “to Sally” kiss her on the lips “. She felt as if she had got “something infinitely precious” when Peter interrupted. The break was a painful shock to her. She compares it to driving your face against a granite wall in the dark, and she also feels Peter’s “hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their camaraderie.” Look at the complete image ‘Mrs. Dalloway ‘is not about events. It’s about how we live just as much in memory and imagination as in a home or a city. Mrs Dalloway is the first big novel in English that explicitly portrays a woman who falls in love with another woman. The year it was published, Woolf, who was 43 years old, started a passionate relationship with novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was a well-known lesbian and married to a gay man. In her diaries and letters, Woolf provokes Vita’s “glowing” beauty in lyrical terms: “She shines in the grocery store in Sevenoaks with a candle-light shine, on legs such as beer trees, pink glowing, grape group, pearl.” Three years later, in 1928, when the lesbian novel of Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, was censored, Woolf and her close friend, the novelist Em Forster, who was also gay, published a protest letter. Hall denied their attempt to make a statement that many writers were willing to sign, because Hall wanted them to defend the book based on the literary merits, not just on the basis of freedom of speech. Neither Woolf nor the other writers thought that the pit of loneliness was a work of literary excellence. Nevertheless, Woolf was ready to testify in court on his behalf, but the court excluded all evidence and banned the book. The pit of loneliness is a historically important book read mainly by scientists; Mrs Dalloway is now as important and surprising as it was first published. Woolf’s novel Orlando, published in 1928, is now very awarded because it is about wonderful sex change and identity. Orlando is inspired by love. Woolf wrote it as a portrait of Sackville-West. But Orlando is not about love. It is a portrait of a remarkable bisexual person. Mrs Dalloway is a much larger novel than Orlando. At the end of Mrs. Dalloway hears Clarissa of the suicide of a traumatized soldier, Septimus, who married a woman but loved a man who died in the war. Clarissa almost realizes that she is similar to Septimus and that he died with the thing that matters most, while she and her friends released it. Is that thing love? Is this the ecstatic sense of unity with the universe? She is not sure, but she knows that it is darkened in her own life: ‘Closing draws apart; Rapture disappeared, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who killed himself – did he plunge to keep his treasure? ‘ If it were to die now, “two now to be the best,” she said, she said, came down in white. “The novel ends with love – Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa’s husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally’s statement:” What makes the brain compared to the heart? ” Ruth vanita is a professor, translator and writer, most recently of the novel a slight angle. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Books Read Next Story