Mrs. Dalloway was Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, although many scholars consider it the first of her great works. Like the novel that preceded it, Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway deals obliquely with the events and social issues surrounding the First World War, focusing on the thoughts and emotions of a variety of characters who all experience these times from differing perspectives. Woolf, born in 1882 in London, was a member of the same upper middle class as most of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, although her family’s interests leaned toward intellectual pursuits instead of political ones. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a respected nineteenth-century scholar. As part of the collection of writers, artists, and intellectuals called the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf was close to people involved in politics; among these political activists were the noted economist Maynard Keynes (who was on the staff of the British delegation to the postwar peace negotiations) and Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, who was literary editor of the left-wing journal The Nation when Mrs. Dalloway was written and published. Many readers attribute the novel’s sympathetic depiction of Septimus Warren Smith’s shell shock to Woolf’s own recurring battle with mental illness.
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