BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fiction
THE VOYAGE OUT
NIGHT AND DAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
A HAUNTED HOUSE
Biography
FLUSH
ROGER FRY
Criticism, etc.
THE COMMON READER
THE SECOND COMMON READER
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
THREE GUINEAS
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS
MRS. DALLOWAY
by
VIRGINIA WOOLF
New York
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.
RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF
All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
Twenty-third printing
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
[Pg 3]
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowersherself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. Thedoors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’smen were coming. And then, thoughtClarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as ifissued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it hadalways seemed to her, when, with a little squeakof the hinges, which she could hear now, she hadburst open the French windows and plunged atBourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,stiller than this of course, the air was in the earlymorning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of awave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteenas she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standingthere at the open window, that something awfulwas about to happen; looking at the flowers, at thetrees with the smoke winding off them and the rooksrising, falling; standing and looking until Peter[Pg 4]Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—wasthat it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was thatit? He must have said it at breakfast one morningwhen she had gone out on to the terrace—PeterWalsh. He would be back from India one of thesedays, June or July, she forgot which, for his letterswere awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, hisgrumpiness and, when millions of things had utterlyvanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings likethis about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting forDurtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, ScropePurvis thought her (knowing her as one does knowpeople who live next door to one in Westminster);a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green,light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, andgrown very white since her illness. There sheperched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, veryupright.
For having lived in Westminster—how manyyears now? over twenty,—one feels even in themidst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissawas positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; anindescribable pause; a suspense (but that mightbe her heart, affected,