Published a century ago in 1925, “Mrs Dalloway” may sound too dated and trivial, in describing a day in the life of Clarissa, a privileged, upper class woman who is preparing for an evening party. With an army of servants to do the actual work, she has time to wander round Bond St. and St. James’s Park, observing with fascination the world recently restored to peace after the ravages of the First World War, yet feeling invisible, continually drifting into nostalgic flashbacks. When young, should she have married Peter Walsh, who challenged her to think and take risks in life, or was she right to become the wife of conventional, materially successful Richard? Had her intense early friendship with a charismatic girl called Sally Seton really been her only experience of true love?

Virginia Woolf has attracted interest as one of the pioneers of “the modern novel”. Certainly, her writing is experimental, varied and original, run through with a common thread of “stream of consciousness” or what she called “free indirect discourse”. Written through a third person narrator, this is the attempt to capture a person’s often unexpected and confused train of thought, the sudden leaps, blank spaces and interruptions. Reading Woolf requires continuous concentration to avoid spinning out of mental control, a passenger clinging on without a seatbelt only to land back unexpectedly on a track of clear, down-to-earth prose. One striking example of this is where Peter Walsh hears a “bubbling, burbling song…. like water spouting…. from a shape like a rusty pump” which turns out to be an old beggar woman to whom he gives a coin – yet this small incident is expanded over several pages to trigger, no doubt, a great variety of responses in different readers.

Woolf liked to complicate the issue by switching the point of view without warning, which serves to supply different interpretations of the same situation. So, partly during a chance visit from Peter Walsh, we see him and Clarissa observing each other, on the verge of regretting what might have been, yet probably indulging in self-delusion. It seems that Woolf was critical of writers like James Joyce, whom she studied carefully, but found wanting, too “confined to the short-term”, in his focus on the thoughts of a single character.

Plot seems incidental, apart from Woolf’s introduction of another, on the face of it very different, character in the form of Septimus Smith, about whom Clarissa is made aware without ever meeting him. He is a bright young working-class clerk who has survived the First World War physically, but is severely shell-shocked. This was a condition little understood at the time, which aroused her concern, perhaps because of the mental problems which enabled her to portray a psychotic state of mind so acutely. Her experiences fed a strong dislike of authoritarian, opinionated medical men, like the oppressive Dr. Bradshaw. Some of the most moving passages are the relationship between Septimus and his sweet young Italians wife Rezia, uncomprehending but empathetic, whom Bradshaw views as an impediment to the young man’s recovery, when the reverse is the case.

Virginia Woolf wrote later that Septimus was Clarissa’s “double”, and she vacillated as to which one of them would finally give up a life which was both loved and an intolerable burden. While able to understand why what we would now call PTSD might drive Septimus to suicide, I could not identify with Clarissa feeling “glad” that he possessed the courage which she lacked to commit an act of “defiance”, and “embrace” death. I’ve simplified her reaction, but it still seems confused when analysed in greater depth. Yet perhaps the mixture of clarity and misperception in her thought processes is the main point.

The novel culminates in a lengthy account of the party, in which Woolf applies her barbed wit, no doubt parodying many of her well-heeled acquaintances: “She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife)….” This, together with the inconclusive and rather bland ending, further obscure the nature of the connection between Clarissa and Septimus. I would judge this a major shortcoming in the novel, if it did not appear arrogant to criticise such an admired work.