“Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf (post 11): Author later said Clarissa and Septimus are “doubles,” but “doubles” is not in the text. What is the lesson?

The text does describe Clarissa’s reaction to Septimus’s suicide in a way that is consistent with their being doubles:

“She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself. Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace…She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it…” (1, pp. 157-158).

But the text does not tell the reader that they are doubles, per se. If the author had not later said so, it would not be known.

“Doubles” is a literary metaphor in which what are depicted as two persons are actually the alternate personalities of one person.

And the text does not tell the reader that that is what Virginia Woolf had in mind (although readers might read that into the text once they knew what the author had said).

The lesson is that novels which look like they have nothing to do with multiple personality might be revealed to involve multiple personality if the author were to disclose what was in her mind.

1. Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway [1925]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.