Roman Clodia’s Reviews > Mrs Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence > Status Update

'Well that the soul - for she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature beating its way about her and trying to escape which momentarily she called the soul - is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloof on that tree.'

'this great Mr Brinsley, had just by pulling the wings off a fly as he talked (about his essays, about himself and once laughing, about a girl there) charged her light being with cloud, and confused her for ever and ever and shrivelled her wings on her back'

'[it] all made her feel that she had come out of her chrysalis and was being proclaimed what in the long comfortable darkness of childhood she had never been - this frail and beautiful creature, this limited and circumscribed creature who could not do what she liked, this butterfly with a thousand facets to its eyes, and delicate fine plumage, and difficulties and sensibilities and sadnesses innumerable: a woman.'

'It would be intolerable if dowdy women came to her party! Would one have liked Keats if he had worn red socks?'

'But my present reflection is that people have any number of different states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. The fashion world'
27 April 1925, Virginia Woolf's diary

'The novel [Mrs Dalloway] comes to an end; the party goes on. Mrs Dalloway's party lives on after and beyond the novel in which it was created.'
~ Introduction