Mrs. Dalloway always had gray hair. She first appears in Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915)—trilling, ladylike, often imperious, and looking “like an eighteenth-century masterpiece,” with a pink face and “hair turning grey.” She doesn’t seem to age or regress between The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, which was published 10 years later and is now celebrating its 100th anniversary. In that novel, her hair is tinged the same color, and she has “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious.” Then the kicker: “though she was over fifty.”
Explore the September 2025 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
View More
The novel’s centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis. Woolf was 40 when she began writing the novel, a decade younger than her protagonist but in the midst of what she called her own “middle age.” As she chronicled in her crackling, astute diary, it was a moment to weigh what one has made and can make of a life.
For Woolf, it ignited a creative fire. In the summer of 1923, about halfway through her work on Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote, “My theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down. Needless to say which I desire.” She went on to catalog her extensive ongoing projects, including an essay on Chaucer, the revision of a slew of old essays, and what she termed “ ‘serious’ reading.” And all of this came during a sustained burst of fiction writing that Woolf—whose work had been derailed by mental breakdowns and spells of illness—relished. From the fall of 1922 through 1924, she got Mrs. Dalloway on paper at a furious rate; in doing so, she reckoned with the incongruity of middle age as she lived it.
The defining feature of midlife is its formlessness. It takes the shape of what it is not—not youth, not old age. (Is 40 old or young? How about 50?) Yet it’s a phase of massive transformation: for some an interlude of welcome stability in which they can take stock, for others a time to take new risks. It doesn’t want for literary examples—the work of recent fiction writers including Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, and Miranda July, for example, revolves around women reflecting on their choices midway through life. In content, if not in style, they all owe something to Mrs. Dalloway.
The novel’s opening—with its famous first line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”—is itself a kind of middle. It launches the reader into Clarissa Dalloway’s morning, into “life; London; this moment of June.” Early on a Wednesday in 1923, in the shadow of the Great War and an influenza pandemic, Clarissa is buying those flowers for a party she is throwing that evening. The rest of the novel follows several characters in a series of streams of consciousness: Clarissa as she experiences the unfolding hours and prepares for her guests; her former lover, Peter Walsh, who wonders whether he can consider his life a success; a World War I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith, who is quickly descending into shell-shock-triggered madness; and a variety of other Londoners. Over the course of that single June day, they contemplate one another, their world, and their places in it.
Virginia Woolf in 1924, at age 42 (Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty)
Clarissa, the wife of a member of Parliament, has chosen a comfortable existence and a stable partner—perhaps at the expense of adventure. But she was once an almost wayward girl, tempted to marry Peter and embark on a more unorthodox course. She ponders all of this as she moves through her busy day, mentally lurching forward and backward in time. And as she does so, she considers her actions in light of her age. When she walks to buy the flowers, for instance, she asserts that “she felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.” Peter unexpectedly comes to visit after years in India, touching off a torrent of thinking about whether she is past her prime: “It was all over for her,” she thinks. “The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow.” And as she readies herself and her house for the party that evening,
she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole.
Age’s attendant regrets and hopes have spurred a crisis inside Clarissa.
It’s also highly plausible that she has entered menopause, or what Woolf later termed in her diary “T of L” (for “Time of Life”). Clarissa has recently been ill, but in deflecting the mention of a friend’s “women’s ailments,” she makes clear that whatever hormonal flux is or isn’t happening, this is not a subject she’ll discuss. She is the right age for it, and she does see herself as “shrivelled, aged, breastless.” What might more readily bring about a crisis of identity than the physical alteration of the body, the change from bearer of life to barren woman?
Clarissa’s more existential fear is one that occasions so many midlife crises—that at 51, she has missed out on some superior array of experiences; that another path would have led to a fresher, happier variant of herself. Woolf’s trademark stream of consciousness, her quick and seamless moves from one character or experience to another, means that the past, present, and future intertwine as if no barrier separates them. And so Clarissa does not ponder her past so much as move through it. The touchstones of her youth—a kiss from her insouciant friend Sally Seton, a transcendent evening spent on the terrace of a country house, her near engagement to Peter—are as alive to her as the mending she does that morning or the lonesome death she imagines for herself in old age.
That aliveness and sense of immediacy are what animate Woolf’s prose—and her heroine. Clarissa eventually basks in the unmitigated joy “that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park.” Her memories, she tells herself, are mostly good. As the day progresses, she thinks that “middle age,” at least for her, is “mediocrity,” but then summons her inner wisdom and will to force “herself with her indomitable vitality to put all that aside.” The core of the novel is Clarissa’s realization that life is happening in the present tense, and so that is where she ought to be.
Mrs. Dalloway was written at a personal turning point for Woolf, too. She moved in early 1924 from a Georgian brick pile in the suburbs of Richmond to a townhouse in the bustling London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where her social calendar often outpaced her. She had initially gone to Richmond for the quiet and rest that her doctors and husband insisted she needed. That is, until Woolf began a campaign to move back to London proper, where, she wrote, she could “dart in & out & refresh my stagnancy.” London was one of her great loves, and the observations in Mrs. Dalloway of its vibrant atmosphere were Woolf’s as well. The change of scenery freed the author to rattle herself in the service of her art and, despite continuing to question her abilities, finally declare pride in her fiction. Although she would live only 17 years more, committing suicide in 1941, this was the beginning of Woolf’s middle age. It was a season of fruitfulness before she succumbed to the mental illness that had stalked her—a period in which she produced her most profound work.
The pleasure she found in London—in the movement of bodies on the sidewalk, the towering spire of St. Pancras Church—and therefore in life, was so potent because it cast her inner darkness in relief. Woolf, who had endured the deaths of siblings and both parents, who had been confined to bed on a milk-and-meat diet during multiple breakdowns, was determined, especially in Mrs. Dalloway, to place life next to death, to surround midlife with the delicious pleasures of both youth and maturity.
For one brief period, and in one magnificent, enduring novel, life emerged the victor. About a year and a half into writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf encountered a dangerous anniversary, that of her mother’s death in 1895, which had occasioned immense distress in 13-year-old Woolf. Yet on this day, she shook off her malaise and wrote, “But enough of death—its [sic] life that matters.” That day, she recalled how even the simplest chore, weeding, had earlier sent her into fits of ecstasy, describing “how the quiet lapped me round” and then “how the beauty brimmed over me & steeped my nerves till they quivered.” Clarissa finds herself in a similar moment at her party: Death has shown up on her doorstep in the form of the news that a young man—Septimus Smith—has thrown himself from a window and died. “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death.” But then she steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she’s made, or perhaps because of them, “she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.”
The clock strikes, the party begins to disperse, the old lady across the street turns out her light for bed, and Clarissa Dalloway notes, “What an extraordinary night!” What an extraordinary day.
*Lead image sources: Sasha / Hulton Archive / Getty; Olga Korneeva / Getty
This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Mrs. Dalloway’s Midlife Crisis.”
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
