'Blaxo,' said Mrs Coates in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.
'Kreemo,' murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleepwalker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater --
'That's an E,' said Mrs Bletchley --
or a dancer --
'It's toffee,' murmured Mr Bowley --
(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself around the broad white shapes of the clouds.
There's a throwaway line in the introduction to this edition which, I think, captures the novel's feel: 'Airy and haunting, it is a book that matches lightness with melancholy.' It all takes place on one day in June, oriented - in flowing stream of consciousness style - around Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith (and especially the first of those), but often slides into viewing events from the perspective of other characters, sometimes just for a paragraph or two, sometimes for pages on end.
Woolf's style of writing is certainly the most striking thing about Mrs Dalloway, but I'm not sure exactly how to describe its effect. It brings a certain immediacy and intimacy, both with the inner lives of the characters (especially in the reminiscences) and with their external circumstances (ie, London of 1923), but it's also a little distancing, in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. One certainly feels for the characters, and seeing Clarissa and Peter Walsh in particular through each other's eyes brings depth and sympathy for both (and likewise their relationships with Sally Seton), as well as a sense of the quiet tragedy and pathos of their lives. Woolf handles the sadness at the edges with a really delicate touch, always filling out the picture with a sense of causes and contexts and never allowing the regrets and wistfulness to overly dominate.
The Septimus threads are touched by something similar. Young, shell-shocked by the war, deeply unhappy, and suffering from delusions, Septimus is set up as a contrast to the middle-aged, well-off social hostess Clarissa, who has led, by her own lights and those of the company she keeps, a full and successful life (though dissenting views are strongly, if subtly, presented by Woolf through the perspectives of Peter and Sally). But I think that Claire Tomalin is right to suggest in her introduction that (to paraphrase somewhat) the deep parallel between Septimus and Clarissa lies in their inchoate attempts to grapple with the everyday terror of life, despite the divergences in their circumstances. Taking it a bit further, this parallel really underlies the entire novel - in a sense, it's what the book is 'about', and what gives it much of its strange power to move me, which it has done.
Like, I suppose, all great literature, Mrs Dalloway is ultimately about life.
