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Deep Readings: Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

July 1, 2025 Deep Readings No Comments

The Fragment

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen.”
Read more → Project Gutenberg Australia

Contextual Glimpse
Published in 1925, Mrs Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s great modernist experiment with consciousness and time. The novel unfolds over a single day in London, interweaving memories and present moments. From the very first line, Woolf sets the tone: not with a grand event, but with a small, domestic decision — buying flowers. Yet within this everyday moment opens a flood of sensations, memories, and anticipations. The ordinary becomes luminous, alive with echoes of youth and intimations of mortality.

Resonance
Clarissa’s plunge into the fresh morning air is more than a memory — it is a metaphor for life itself. What seems ordinary — a door opening, air rushing in — becomes charged with awe, as if “something awful” (in its older sense of awe‑full, filled with magnitude) is always about to happen. Woolf shows us that daily gestures can hold the weight of destiny.

Why this may also be about you
How often do you pass through doorways, hear a hinge, feel a breath of morning, without realizing it is also an opening into the depth of your life? Woolf teaches us that meaning is not hidden in distant events but in the texture of the present moment.

Lisa’s inspired, original idea about this fragment
The squeak of the hinge may be the novel’s true music. A small, ordinary sound becomes the threshold between the safe inside and the wide, unpredictable outside. Perhaps every hinge in our lives squeaks like that — marking the exact moment when we move from memory into possibility.

Inner Invitation
Close your eyes and imagine opening a door on a fresh morning. Feel the air on your skin. Sense both calmness and a faint tremor, as if something vast is waiting just beyond. Let yourself rest in that in‑between space: not yet inside, not fully outside, but on the threshold. What door in your own life is waiting to be opened today?

Closing Note
Woolf’s fragment reminds us that the most delicate gestures — buying flowers, opening a window — can reveal the whole of life shimmering beneath them.

Keywords
ordinary, memory, youth, threshold, morning, awe, present moment, time, perception, mortality, possibility