Mrs Dalloway - AO5

Clarissa

• Paul Bailey - "at her most interesting she is a snobbish, vain, repressed lesbian who has dabbled in culture, but for the greater part of the novel she is only a shadow, poetically enshrined" 

• Gilbert and Gubar - Clarrissa is "a kind of queen" who "with a divine grace...regenerates the post-war world" 

• Gary Carey - “the death of Clarissa's soul began the moment she married Richard” 

• Julia Courtney - Clarissa simultaneously "experiences the party as unreal, and herself as superficial" but also sees it as "a gift, an offering, an affirmation of life" 

• Sutherland and Hislop - "she takes off her feathered yellow hat as if discarding her social pretensions” 

Septimus

• Elaine Showalter - "Unable to reconcile his unconscious desire with his strong feelings of propriety and even class superiority, Septimus sees all sexual desire as evil and sordid" 

• Elaine Showalter - "we tend to see Septimus as the victim of medical power, whose suicide is, as Clarissa says, a heroic act of defiance" 

• Isabel Gamble -  'Septimus has recognised certain necessities evaded by Clarissa, or perhaps never encountered by her'. 

• Bonnie Kime Scott - Septimus' death leads Clarissa to 'reach for an understanding that goes beyond 'the people she knew best'' 

• Julia Courtney - Clarissa admires Septimus "as if his suicide is an act of personal reintegration" 

• Kirsty Hewitt - 'Clarissa Dalloway embraces the past, Peter Walsh wallows within it and traumatised Septimus Smith tries his utmost to repel it' 

Peter Walsh

• Elaine Showalter - Peter's "sense of the social changes in England is primarily sexual" 

• Elaine Showalter - "While women live their lives vicariously through their daughters, men have the chance to renew their lives through action" 

• Elaine Showalter – As Peter ages he makes a 'defiant attempt to recapture his sense of youth, virility and romance through following women on the street' 

Elizabeth

• Rachel Bowlby - 'Elizabeth is driven by ambitions beyond the ken of women thirty years before, and unencumbered by the pressure of masculine interference' 

• Rachel Bowlby - 'Elizabeth's imaginative nature could be then as a positive sign of women's progress'  but she 'readily returns for the time being, to her domestic calling, as a good, civilised daughter' 

• Rachel Bowlby - 'Whereas Jane Eyre dreams out from a distant rooftop, Elizabeth Dalloway is already on top of the bus, travelling through the city in which she may well fulfil her ambitions' 

Doris Kilman

• Elaine Folton - 'Miss Kilman searches for human connection in a world that has rejected her.' 

• Phyllis Rose – "Miss Kilman share[s] in the masculine crime of 'forcing' the soul, where forcing has the meanings...of rape" 

Class

• Alex Zwerdling - "Woolf gives us a picture of a class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it, a class that worships tradition and settled order, but cannot accommodate the new and disturbing" 

• Elaine Showalter - 'the war seems to have left the governing classes curiously untouched' 

• John Sutherland and Susanna Hislopp - 'In her attempts to criticise the social system, Woolf is trying to show that what proportion and conversion really amount to is coercion'  

• Alex Zwerdling - "Clarissa's party is strictly class-demarcated. No Septimus, no Rezia, no Doris Kilman could conceivably set foot in it." 

• Alex Zwerdling - 'The fundamental conflict is between those who identify with Establishment and those who resist or are repelled by it" 

Oppression of women

• Jaqueline Rose - "The name of the husband is the strongest insignia of patriarchal power" 

• Carolyn Heilbrun - 'After youth and childbearing are past, women have no plot, there is no story to be told about them' 

Woolf - Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown

• "In or about December 1910, human character changed"

• "All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature"