Following on from my thoughts on Recommended! by Nicola Wilson, here’s another book so up my street that it feels like a personal favour. Foolishly, I have delayed writing my review for months – I finished it at the beginning of March – but hopefully I remember enough to help you understand why I loved it so much. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (2025) came as a review copy, and I read it as soon as it landed.
As the title suggests, this explores Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you read Hussey’s book if you haven’t already read Woolf’s, though you don’t need to have a photographic memory for everything in the original to enjoy this. What I do recommend, actually, is listening to Kristin Scott Thomas’s excellent audiobook of Mrs Dalloway alongside Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel. You’ll definitely want to revisit Mrs D one way or another.
The book starts with the background to Mrs Dalloway – starting with a quick overview of the writing and response to her previous novel, Jacob’s Room, which is often seen as a turning point in her development as a writer. For a woman who wrote so much, with almost every scrap of paper being published, it’s surprising how often the same things are used and reused in any book about Woolf. The ‘life is a luminous halo’ quote; the discovery of ‘how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’. Mrs Dalloway: Biography for a Novel would feel incomplete without them – but they are thankfully only the starting point.
We see how Woolf’s notes and intentions came together in various early drafts of Mrs Dalloway. I was particularly interested in what Hussey notes about the characters Mr and Mrs Dalloway in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out – since I’d always assumed she lifted them from there. As he points out, they are not really the same characters: exploring how she can re-use characters, but also transform them, does take some dealing with – some acceptance of literary slipperiness that doesn’t come easily. But it is definitely worth exploring.
Hussey sets Woolf’s approach in its context – in her own development as a writer, but also in the contemporary literary context. He avoids some of the simplistic received wisdom about James Joyce, and gives a much more nuanced reading:
Woolf and Joyce have often been set up as antagonists, the surface similarities between Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway – both taking place on a single June day in a capital city – offered as evidence of Joyce’s ‘influence’ or even of Woolf’s plagiarism. Such views invariably rely on the casually nasty remarks Woolf made in her diary, that Joyce’s book called to mind ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’, or that it was evidently the production of a ‘self-taught working man’. But Woolf’s discomfort at the ‘indecency’ in Ulysses was not the primness of a late-Victorian woman (who, after all, enjoyed Lytton Strachey’s lewd poems very much). Her objection was baed on the suspicion that it was a ‘dodge’ to convince readers that here was something unprecedented: ‘Must get out of the way of thinking that indecency is more real than anything else’ was another of her reading notes.
Amen, Virginia! Hussey takes us, of course, through the content of Mrs Dalloway – the inspirations that could have helped compose Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, putting them thoughtfully in the context of contemporary conversations about mental health, the long-term impact of war, and the place of women – and different types of women – in the 1920s. Some of this is necessarily based a little on conjecture and on broader themes – but Hussey is brilliant at detail too. There is a satisfyingly in-depth look at slight variants between editions – something perhaps most exciting to the Woolf nerd like me, even while it undermines the idea of literary stability.
The proofs Woolf sent to Harcourt Brace in New York were marked differently by Woolf than those she subsequently sent back to her printer for the Hogarth Press edition. Owing to these difference, together with the American compositor failing to indicate where space breaks fell at the foot of a page, the Harcourt edition appeared with only eight sections. When a second English edition appeared as part of the ‘Uniform Edition’ of Woolf’s works in 1929, a break was missed between sections seven and eight, resulting in a version with eleven sections. Various editors have made decisions over the ensuing years that have resulted in a kind of free-for-all, with some versions of Mrs Dalloway having ten, others eight, others eleven sections, and so on.
The initial reception to Mrs Dalloway – from critics and from the public – feeds my appetite for this sort of literary gossip. Woolf also documented her response to this response, and I found it all fascinating. And it continues! The latter sections look at the continuing legacy of the novel – how critics have assessed it over time, and the works it has influenced. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours gets substantial space, of course, and it’s instructive to see what this did to a revitalising of Woolf’s readership – but there are also enjoyably unexpected legacies. Did you expect this book to mention Miley Cyrus? Or to show Mrs Dalloway with scar, sword, and eye patch?
Hussey is also merciless in his delving into particularly stupid reviews. I was rather shocked by what Philip Hensher wrote in 2003 about Woolf being better known for her life than her novels which were (Hensher wrote) “inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent”. Hussey lets critics like this expose their own ignorance, giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. But it certainly helps explain why I found the only Hensher novel I read to be pretty unsuccessful.
Having said that, though, Hussey doesn’t always keep himself in the background – and I appreciated when his own voice comes through. There were some excellent turns of phrase – Wyndham Lewis is described as ‘One of the arch-enemies of Bloomsbury was that talented precursor of today’s laddish critics’ – and sections that feel more personal than academic. I enjoyed the mix.
Literary criticism might be imagined as a sprawling conversation among professionals about reading. The conversation moves on or lingers, repeats itself or brings to light somethiong new, confuses or clarifies, and at times can be difficult even for insiders to follow. At its heart, though, when all the theories and specialised terminology, the trends and assumptions, are put aside, literary criticism consists of people saying ‘I thought this when I read that’. How we are ‘supposed’ to feel about Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh or Doris Kilman is the wrong quetion. More interesting is to ask how do you feel, and why?
Speaking of Doris Kilman, I think the only section of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel that felt less successful to me was an extended reading of Doris Kilman – broadly whether she is an empathetic character or not, and what Woolf might be trying to achieve with the character. It was very interesting, but didn’t feel quite like it fit into the structure of the book – more like a discussion from an undergraduate seminar that he wanted to use but couldn’t quite work out where. My only other quibble with the book was the absence of an index, but that might just be in my advance proof copy – I haven’t checked the final published version.
Minute quibbles for a brilliant achievement. You might be surprised, after seeing all that Hussey has included in this book, to learn that it’s only 180 pages, plus notes, references etc. It’s amazing how comprehensive he can be in a relatively short space. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel does two things marvellously: give a huge amount of relevant, fascinating, detailed information in a distinct and enjoyable way, and remind me why I love Woolf’s novel so much. Now, of course, I am impatient for Hussey to give the same treatment to all the rest of Woolf’s oeuvre.
