“An Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf (post 9): Author says novel written “without conscious direction” and that two characters are “doubles”

To correct literary criticism of her novel, Virginia Woolf wrote this brief introduction to Mrs Dalloway three years after the novel’s publication.

Not Experimental

“This book, it was said, was the deliberate offspring of a method. The author, it was said, dissatisfied with the form of fiction then in vogue, was determined to beg, borrow, steal or even create another of her own. But, as far as it is possible to be honest about the mysterious process of the mind, the facts are otherwise…the idea started as the oyster starts…And this it did without any conscious direction. The little note-book in which an attempt was made to forecast a plan was soon abandoned, and the book grew day by day, week by week, without any plan at all, except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing…in the present case it was necessary to write the book first and to invent a theory afterwards” (1).

Theme of The Double

“…in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her [Mrs. Dalloway’s] double, had no existence…Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself…” (1).

Comment

Virginia Woolf did eventually kill herself. That Mrs. Dalloway was originally intended to kill herself suggests that this character had originally represented the author in this regard. But then Septimus, as Mrs. Dalloway’s “double,” was substituted for Mrs. Dalloway to represent Virginia Woolf’s suicidality.

Does the switch from suicidal Mrs. Dalloway to suicidal Septimus imply that Virginia Woolf’s suicidal (or internally homicidal) personality was male?

1. Virginia Woolf. “An Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway [1928],” pages 10-12, in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Edited by Francine Prose. Orlando, Harcourt Inc., 2003.