Mrs. Dalloway's Midlife Crisis

Virginia Woolf's wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age.

- By Hillary Kelly

Mrs. Dalloway always had gray hair. She first appears in Virginia Woolf's debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915)—trilling, ladylike, often imperious, and looking “like an eighteenth-century masterpiece,” with a pink face and “hair turning grey.” She doesn’t seem to age or regress between The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, which was published 10 years later and is now celebrating its 100th anniversary. In that novel, her hair is tinged the same color, and she has “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious.” Then the kicker: “though she was over fifty.”

The novel’s centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis. Woolf was 40 when she began writing the novel, a decade younger than her protagonist but in the midst of what she called her own “middle age.” As she chronicled in her crackling, astute diary, it was a moment to weigh what one has made and can make of a life.

For Woolf, it ignited a creative fire. In the summer of 1923, about halfway through her work on Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote, “My theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down. Needless to say which I desire.” She went on to catalog her extensive ongoing projects, including an essay on Chaucer, the revision of a slew of old essays, and what she termed “'serious' reading.” And all of this came during a sustained burst of fiction writing that Woolf—whose work had been derailed by mental breakdowns and spells of illness—relished. From the fall of 1922 through 1924, she got Mrs. Dalloway on paper at a furious rate; in doing so, she reckoned with the incongruity of middle age as she lived it.