Lawrence’s work (although it’s been a while since I’ve read him) and also of Elizabeth Bowen’s in the way that the characters didn’t act like any people I know and didn’t talk like them either they do things like suddenly appearing at each other’s houses, making strange pronouncements, and then just as suddenly leaving. The novel is fairly traditional in its structure - it’s about romance after all - and yet it doesn’t quite feel like a Victorian novel there’s so much focus on introspection and shifting states of consciousness that it seemed to me clearly a 20C work (published in 1919). I won’t tell you all the twists and turns of who falls in love with whom I’ll just say that much of the novel involves these young people agonizing over what it means to be in love, whether love is even possible for them, what kind of marriage they want, and when and if they should confess their feelings to each other. These four meet early on in the novel and later are joined by a fifth, Cassandra, Katherine’s cousin, who steps in to make this already-complicated love quadrangle even more complicated.
Mary and Ralph are good friends Ralph lives with his family and works as a lawyer, although he dreams of owning a cottage in the country where he can work on his writing. Mary lives on her own and spends her days working for women’s suffrage Katherine envies her independence, although Mary worries where it is taking her - she doesn’t want to end up like the eccentrics she works with, so devoted to a cause that they can’t see beyond it and begin to lose their common sense.
His ideal woman is not likely to spend her free time working at math.Īnd then there are Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham, both of whom come from decidedly less comfortable circumstances than the other characters. William is a rather surprising choice for Katherine - while she’s fairly free-thinking and open-minded, he’s conventional to a fault, particularly so in his views about proper womanly behavior. They spend their days surrounded by his papers and their memories in spite of her family history, however, Katherine is not terribly literary and prefers to work on mathematics problems in secret. There’s Katherine Hilbery and her fiancé William Rodney, first of all Katherine is the granddaughter of a famous poet and she and her mother are working (not very successfully) on his biography. The novel tells the story of five young people who fall in and out of love with each other.
Dalloway, and, as I didn’t expect, it has some odd moments and some tedious ones, but overall it’s an enjoyable, interesting novel.
As I expected, it doesn’t live up to her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. I have now finished Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, and have mixed but mostly positive feelings about it.
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