Mrs Dalloway and the Music of Time

In this centennial tribute to "Mrs Dalloway", Emre Aracı explores Virginia Woolf’s timeless novel as one might a symphonic masterpiece—analysing its motifs, modulations, and emotional cadences with the ear of a musician and the eye of a literary pilgrim. From the chimes of Big Ben to the shadowed glades of St James’s Park, from Woolf’s Bayreuth impressions to Clarissa’s London promenade, Aracı draws musical and philosophical parallels that dissolve the boundaries between time and memory. What emerges is a moving meditation on the rhythm of consciousness, the fragility of existence, and the lingering resonance of a single June day.

On the centenary of its publication, I find myself returning once more to Mrs Dalloway—or perhaps, more fittingly, to its score, as one might return to a symphony, pausing upon each motif, each theme, attempting anew to unravel the intricacies of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel. As I accompany Clarissa’s elegant footsteps through the streets of London on a June morning, I am struck by how the novel’s texture is woven with the thematic craftsmanship of a Bach fugue, yet it shimmers with the impressionism of a Debussy prelude, gliding gently into the recesses of the mind. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique becomes, in a sense, music itself—music that dissolves into the dissonance of tonality defied.

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Dalloway

The edition in my hands is not merely the plain text of the novel, but The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 2021), prepared with scholarly meticulousness by Oxford academic Merve Emre. Like a musicologist poring over a manuscript, I delve into the footnotes appended to each of Woolf’s words, linger over the wealth of illustrations, and trace the pulse of time that throbs between the lines. This is no longer simply a novel; it has become a symphony of memory and time, an infinite score compressed into a single day of life, enveloping me completely. From the very first page of this annotated edition, the pulse of London’s heart begins to beat through Woolf’s prose. That sound—defining the rhythm of the work like a metronome—is the chime of Big Ben, rising from the resplendent clock tower that has become synonymous with the silhouette of the Houses of Parliament, a relic of Victorian grandeur. Its strikes, weighing fifteen tons, pierce the morning hush and reverberate across the city like ripples cast upon still water. When I read in Emre’s footnotes that the bell’s characteristic tone is an E natural, something within me vibrates like a tuning fork, and in one of Woolf’s most exquisite sentences, time itself seems to melt into air:

“There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air”.

But it is not only the clock that arrests time in this moment—it is memory itself. Woolf’s “leaden circles” are no mere chronometric metaphors; they are, rather, allegories of being unravelled, of existence quietly dissolving. And as we read this passage, it is as if, with Clarissa—who has stepped out early to buy fresh flowers for her party that evening—we too are transported a century back, into the cool morning hush of 1920s London, guided by the melodic resonance of Big Ben.

But what, one might ask, is that melodic prelude which precedes the deep chime of the hour? There it is—that familiar strain which rises just before Big Ben sounds its toll to mark the time: a melodic figure composed of short, four-note motifs, repeating and growing with each passing quarter: the Westminster Chimes. And yet, contrary to what the name might suggest, its origins lie not in Westminster, but rather in Cambridge. The melody was first composed in 1793 for the bells of Great St Mary’s, the university church at the heart of Cambridge. From there, it later made its way to the Palace of Westminster, where it became England’s most iconic soundmark of time.

Said to have been inspired by the aria 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' from Handel’s Messiah, the melody forms an unseen bridge between the exalted grandeur of the Baroque and the resonant voice of the famous clocktower, now known as the Elizabeth Tower in honour of the late Queen. During my own years in Cambridge, I must have passed by this silent legacy countless times—often scarcely aware of it. How was I to know, then, that the very chime which drifted into my ears outside St Mary’s would one day accompany Clarissa on her morning walk through a Virginia Woolf novel—that it would find its way into literature, folded into the very rhythm of Big Ben? Perhaps this is why I so relish reading books as one might analyse a musical composition. Each sentence contains its own tonality; each paragraph harbours a hidden modulation.

"I yielded to the rhythm of time as marked by the strokes of Big Ben", (photo © Emre Aracı)

And once again, arm in arm with Mrs Dalloway, I find myself wandering the quiet paving stones of Dean’s Yard in the early morning, yielding to the rhythm of time as marked by the strokes of Big Ben drifting from the Elizabeth tower.

That morning, just as in the novel, my steps lead me to Hatchard's, the King’s bookseller. My eyes rest upon the finely bound volumes in the window, and in their reflection I almost glimpse the silhouette of Clarissa herself. In honour of the centenary of Woolf’s masterpiece, an edition of only two thousand copies has been issued—a slender green volume adorned with a William Morris design. I place copy number 983 in my bag as though tucking away a treasure.

"I place copy number 983 in my bag as though tucking away a treasure"

As Clarissa makes her way down Victoria Street, she suddenly finds herself at the very centre of existence, at the very heart of life itself—just as Vanessa Redgrave does in the 1997 film adaptation of Mrs Dalloway, gliding through the London streets with an elegant parasol in hand, seeming almost to lift the city out of time. The city, with all its crowds, its thrumming symphony, surges around her—yet within that hum lies a hidden harmony, a submerged meaning. Woolf captures this moment with such delicacy, such precision, that it feels as though emotion itself swells upon the page like a sudden crescendo in an orchestral score:

“Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June”.

What Woolf celebrates in these lines is not simply the city, but the moment itself—life, London, a single day in June. As Merve Emre astutely notes in her introduction to the annotated edition, Woolf never shied from drawing upon the traces of her own life in her fiction. Yet she did so not with obvious transparency, but rather through a kind of subterranean intimacy, an exploration of the soul’s hidden terrain. She was never concerned with the coarse, tangled material of gossip, but with something far more elusive: the ineffability of the spirit.

Her novels sought not merely to recount events, but to be suffused with the full range of human consciousness—with love and loathing, with longing and unease, with remorse and quiet sighs, with tremors poised at the edge of madness—and, above all, with the astonishing miracle that these things may be felt at all.

In truth, Clarissa Dalloway was born in Virginia Woolf’s imagination long before the novel Mrs Dalloway ever took shape upon the page. Her first appearance in literature came not in the 1925 novel that bears her name, but in The Voyage Out, published in 1912. There, aboard a vessel bound for the fictitious South American colony of Santa Marina, Clarissa wanders the deck in a vision of gossamer silks and heavy furs; when she descends to dinner, her presence—arrayed in pure white, a diamond necklace catching the light—transforms her, in the eyes of fellow passengers, into something akin to a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds or George Romney.

Clarissa delights in flowers. She yearns to learn Ancient Greek, so that she might read Plato in the original beside the hearth, and she reads aloud Austen’s Persuasion to her husband, Richard. At the piano, she evokes an aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, her fingers recalling, with a quiet smile, that first visit to Bayreuth. And yet this memory did not belong solely to the fictional Clarissa—it was one Woolf herself had lived.

In August 1909 Virginia Woolf attended the Bayreuth Festival (image © Emre Aracı)

In August of 1909, Virginia Woolf travelled to the Bayreuth Festival with her brother Adrian and their close friend Saxon Sydney-Turner. She was young, yet already making an impression in literary circles, and later that same month, The Times published one of her earliest pieces of published prose: an essay entitled Impressions at Bayreuth. There, amidst the enchanted groves of Bavaria and the temple consecrated to Wagner’s mythic art, Woolf too had encountered the spell that would later echo in Clarissa’s memory—a fusion of life, music, and introspection that would ripple through her fiction for years to come.

Woolf’s first journey to Bayreuth, when recalled through the musical reverberations that echo in Clarissa’s memory, reminds us once more of the porousness of time and memory. And within the lines of that early essay, we glimpse not only Woolf’s responsiveness to music, but her extraordinary powers of observation—of nature, of light, and of the human figure. One passage, in particular, reveals this with crystalline clarity: “It has been possible, during the last performances, to step out of the opera house and find oneself in the midst of a warm summer evening. From the hill above the theatre you look over a wide land, smooth and without hedges; it is not beautiful but it is very large and tranquil. One may sit among rows of turnips and watch a gigantic old woman, with a blue cotton bonnet on her head, and a figure like one of Dürer's, swinging her hoe. The sun draws out strong scents from the hay and the pine trees, and if one thinks at all, it is to combine the simple landscape with the landscape of the stage. When the music is silent the mind insensibly slackens and expands, among the happy surroundings: heat and the yellow light, and the intermittent but not unmusical noises of insects and leaves smooth out the folds”, (Impressions at Bayreuth, 1909).

Now, as I recall my own introspective journey to Bayreuth—deserted, steeped in the solemn melancholy of autumn—which I recorded in the pages of Andante in 2020, my mind carries me first to the Sussex countryside, to a painting glimpsed on the wall of Charleston Farmhouse. It depicts one of the quietest members of the Bloomsbury Group, the poet and musician Saxon Sydney-Turner, lost in thought at the piano, rendered by Vanessa Bell in 1908. I find myself wondering, “What was he playing at that moment? Tristan, perhaps? Or Parsifal?”.

“Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano” by Vanessa Bell, (© Charleston Foundation)

Wandering the labyrinth of my own consciousness, I suddenly find myself once again walking the streets of London with Mrs Dalloway. For Woolf’s novel leads the reader not only through time, but through the corridors of the self. 

And thus, the name of Wagner appears without warning in the pages of her 1925 novel, reaching out like a hand—an echo of an association, the voice of a memory—like the sudden reappearance of a lost friend.

At that moment, one has entered St James’s Park. And how curious it is that, upon entering, one is immediately enveloped by a hush—the mist, the faint murmur, the slow-gliding ducks and swans—all of it opens a new window in the depths of one’s consciousness. One remembers, perhaps, a slow, companionable stroll through the park many years ago, just before dinner at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on Pall Mall.

“Here at Bayreuth, where the music fades into the open air, and we wander with Parsifal in our heads through empty streets at night, where the gardens of the Hermitage glow with flowers like those other magic blossoms, and sound melts into colour, and colour calls out for words, where, in short, we are lifted out of the ordinary world and allowed merely to breathe and see - it is here that we realize how thin are the walls between one emotion and another; and how fused our impressions are with elements which we may not attempt to separate”, writes Woolf in Impressions at Bayreuth.

St James's Park "shimmering with magical blossoms", (photo © Emre Aracı)

That evening too, from the depths of the park—shimmering with magical blossoms—we heard the solemn toll of Big Ben, its sound dissolving like leaden circles into the air, spreading slowly across the city. Within that chime, we felt the echoes of countless lost souls, their voices resonating faintly in the dusk. As we turn the pages of Mrs Dalloway a century later, we sense anew how thin the walls between emotions truly are—how the fleeting worth of love and life is made eternal in the pages of a novel that unfolds over a single day. And in that moment, the distance between past and present all but vanishes. The London of a hundred years ago becomes, if only briefly, as vivid and tangible as the day we are living now. Through Woolf’s language, which bends time itself, we come to feel not merely the span of a day, but the full succession of seasons within the soul. With Clarissa, we live—if only in memory—the infinity held within a single day, accompanied always by the quiet music of time.

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Bir güne sığan sonsuzluk: Mrs Dalloway ve zamanın müziği’ in the August 2025 issue (No. 226) of Andante.

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