Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street
Virginia Woolf
Contains spoilers for the entire book.
Discussion topics
Topic 01 of 08
A morning in London
What sort of person emerges from Clarissa’s reactions during her walk to buy gloves?
Keep the conversation going
- Where did her delight in the city feel most vivid?
- Which passing judgment made you reconsider your first impression of her?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.
Discussion topics
What sort of person emerges from Clarissa’s reactions during her walk to buy gloves?
Keep the conversation going
- Where did her delight in the city feel most vivid?
- Which passing judgment made you reconsider your first impression of her?
How do childhood memories, remembered conversations, and lines of poetry change the experience of this ordinary errand?
Keep the conversation going
- What does the movement between the street and Clarissa’s thoughts let us notice?
- How does the repeated return to poetry about death sit alongside the energy of the June morning?
How do Clarissa’s ideas about good breeding shape what she admires and what she dismisses?
Keep the conversation going
- What does her admiration for Lady Bexborough reveal about the life she values?
- How do her judgments of clothes, modern pictures, and people in passing cars fit together?
What do you make of Clarissa’s sympathy for the shopwoman and her decision not to offer her a country holiday?
Keep the conversation going
- How does remembering Dick’s advice influence that decision?
- What changes when sympathy gives way to impatience about the gloves and the change?
How does the war enter a story that seems at first to be about shopping?
Keep the conversation going
- What connections do you see between the remembered deaths and the complaint about the quality of gloves?
- How does Clarissa’s thought that young men died so things could go on affect your view of this morning?
How do you understand Clarissa’s thought that one lives for others when she no longer feels certain about God?
Keep the conversation going
- What do her memories of loss add to that thought?
- Where do her actions in the shop support or complicate the way she sees herself?
What does the abrupt ending with the explosion and the recognition of Miss Anstruther leave you thinking about Clarissa?
Keep the conversation going
- How do the shopwomen’s and Clarissa’s different reactions change the scene?
- What is gained by ending at this instant rather than explaining the noise or continuing their conversation?
If you have read Mrs Dalloway, how does this Clarissa compare with the one who buys the flowers herself a few years later in Woolf's novel?
Keep the conversation going
- What did Woolf keep from this story, and what did she change?
- Does the story stand on its own for a reader who has not read the novel?
There is no single right answer. Bring your own reading.