Mrs Dalloway - critics

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 (Clarissa)

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”

Elaine Showalter (Septimus)

"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 (suicide)

"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 (admiration)

Clarissa admires Septimus "as if his suicide is an act of personal reintegration"

Elaine Showalter (Peter sex)

Peter's "sense of the social changes in England is primarily sexual"

Elaine Showalter (men vs women)

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

Elaine Showalter (Peter youth)

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

Rachel Bowlby (ambition)

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

Rachel Bowlby (imagination)

'Elizabeth's imaginative nature could be seen 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 (Jane Eyre)

'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'

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"

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 (war)

The war seems to have left the governing classes curiously untouched

Sutherland and 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 (party)

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

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'

Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (1)

"In or about December 1910, human character changed"

Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (2)

"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"

Kirsty Hewitt

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

Alex Zwerdling (Establishment)

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