INSPIRED BY THE VOYAGE OUT

Literature

Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the conservative husband and wife who appear briefly in The Voyage Out (1915), recur several times in Virginia Woolf’s writings. The short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923) features a fleshed-out version of dour housewife Clarissa. In Woolf’s acclaimed 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, the character, now one of complexity and depth, appears in an elaborately nuanced portrayal that is a far cry from the unsympathetic, one-dimensional Clarissa of The Voyage Out. The style of Mrs. Dalloway was experimental for the time, employing inner monologues of the characters, stream of consciousness, and a free, indirect style.

Mrs. Dalloway takes place during a single day in London in the late spring of 1923. While Clarissa prepares for a party she will host that evening, she retraces the steps she has taken to become an unremarkable wife and mother. Memories emerge of her raucous childhood friend Sally Seton, with whom she had a flirtation, and her former lover Peter Walsh, a colonial administrator and poet. Meanwhile, the book also follows a traumatized ex-soldier named Septimus Smith as he grapples with his inability to find meaning in everyday life. Facing twin specters of mental breakdown and institutional confinement, Smith throws himself from a window. Upon hearing the story of Smith’s death at the party that night, Clarissa also briefly considers suicide but instead recognizes anew the beauty to be found in life.

The life of Virginia Woolf and the story of Clarissa Dalloway inspired Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998), which uses Woolf’s original title for Mrs. Dalloway. In the same way that Woolf intertwines the lives of Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway, Cunningham connects the stories of three women: Woolf herself, on the day she takes her own life by drowning in the River Ouse; Laura Brown, a lifeless 1950s housewife in Los Angeles who is obsessed with Woolf’s novel; and Clarissa Vaughan, a lesbian living in Greenwich Village in the 1990s who is preparing a party for her friend Richard, a poet. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Film and Theater

Mrs. Dalloway (1997), directed by Marleen Gorris, utilizes flashbacks from Clarissa’s past to convey her musings on the roads not taken in life. Vanessa Redgrave stars as the married Clarissa, with Natascha McElhone as her younger incarnation. Michael Kitchen and Alan Cox portray, respectively, the older and the younger Peter Walsh. Rupert Graves rounds out the cast as Septimus Smith.

The screenwriter of Mrs. Dalloway, Eileen Atkins, also wrote the play Vita and hirginia (1992), an adaptation based on the letters of Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Atkins played Sackville-West in the original production in England and also in the 1994 off-Broadway production, which co-starred Vanessa Redgrave. A writer and poet, Sackville-West was Woolf’s confidante and lover, and the inspiration for her fictional biography Orlando (1928).

In 1989 Atkins starred as Woolf in a one-woman adaptation of Woolf’s feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own (1929). The slim volume, which declares that in order to be a writer a woman needs a room of her own and £500 a year, began for Woolf as a series of lectures at Cambridge University. The off-Broadway performance earned Atkins a Drama Desk Award for best solo performance. Atkins later filmed a performance for British television (shown in the United States on Masterpiece Theatre), using as her stage the hall at Cambridge where Woolf first delivered her lectures.

The highly acclaimed film of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (2002) fluidly interweaves the stories of its three female characters, diverging from the book, which presents them as discrete accounts. The effect pays off in a resonant synchronicity in the lives of Woolf and her spiritual descendants. Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, Meryl Streep portrays Clarissa Vaughn, and Ed Harris takes the role of the poet, Richard. A haunting score by Philip Glass punctuates the lyrical film. The Hours was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay (David Hare), Best Director (Steven Daldry), and Best Picture. Nicole Kidman won the Best Actress award for her aggressive portrayal of Virginia Woolf. Moore, Harris, and Glass also received Oscar nominations for their work in the film.