After a bit of a rocky start (where all I could think about was Woolf’s manic love for a semicolon), I ended up loving Mrs Dalloway! I was utterly absorbed by Woolf’s ability to depict the mundanity of everyday life in an extraordinary way - I felt like I was living alongside Clarissa, Peter, Septimus, and Elizabeth, and it’s for that reason that I’ve really been falling in love with stream-of-consciousness novels this year. I find it endlessly fascinating to be inside someone else’s head, albeit a fictional someone.
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Admittedly the shifts in perspective were somewhat off-putting, as I’d be loving reading about Clarissa’s crush on her best friend Sally and then all of a sudden we’d be in some guy called Graham’s head and I’d be doing a Peter Kavinsky (à la To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, watch it if you haven’t) like whoa whoa whoa hold up who is Graham and when will the queer tendencies be coming back??
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But overall I was super glad I stuck with it through the first 30 pages or so, after this point I was truly immersed, and even flitting from person to person from paragraph to paragraph became less confusing once I let myself be swept away by the narrative. You forget that the book takes place over one day, as Clarissa and her fellows delve back into memories of the past and thoughts of the present.
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I know this gets a lot of mixed reviews, a lot of people told me they didn’t finish it and that’s fine, I was on the edge during the first 30 pages. But I think if you’re in two minds about trying it, just sit for an hour with it and persevere, and see if it sweeps you up like it did me!