Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway isn't exactly an easy read.

It is, however, if you give it some effort, really quite intoxicating, because it is strange and fresh. In this novel Mrs Dalloway plans a party, buys some flowers, mends her dress, is visited by an old flame, and has a moment with her husband, who wants to tell her he loves her, doesn't, but he does take her some roses and hold her hand. Then she lies down for a while, and in the evening she plays the gushing, warm hostess at her party, which is a very grand party (and the Prime Minister attends).

But there's more to it than this! Is Mrs Dalloway a lesbian, who constantly remembers her darling first love, Sally? (It seems so.) But in her thoughts she often goes to her old flame, Peter Walsh, and her old home, Bourton. And Peter Walsh also goes about London and considers his past and his future.  Is Mrs Dalloway psychologically linked with a mentally disturbed veteran of the Great War? (Yes.) Is Mrs Dalloway a portal to a range of consciousnesses and feelings? - for she feels one thing and the next minute she feels almost the opposite thing, just as people do, so she is not a fixed personality made up of streaks of good or evil, but a different person almost at every second.

On the first page we are told that the doors are to be taken off their hinges: perhaps this is a hint. Things are going to come through the pages of the novel that have not previously come through such portals. We are going to get a first-hand account of what it is like to be psychotic, like poor Septimus, the war veteran, all his strange fears and hallucinations, and also what it is like to look after someone who is psychotic, like Septimus's wife Rezia. We are going to find out how lovely it is to be Mrs Dalloway as she sits and mends her party dress, and how her old flame feels about her - how remarkable she is, how vivid, but with a streak which others call coldness.

From the Wordsworth Classics edition, p 88-9

But - but - why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? ... but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unjustly, for her parties! That was it! That was it!
Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard [her husband] merely thought it was foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. and both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.
"That's what I do it for," she said, speaking aloud, to life.

An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . . 

People do think about sex, in the novel, Peter Walsh refers to it as "the other thing" and realises that it wouldn't be good for him with Clarissa. [How do people know this?] Peter Walsh is getting ready for the party and thinking to himself:

... and yet nobody,of course, was more dependent upon others (he buttoned his waistcoat); it had been his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking-rooms, liked colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above all women's society, and the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving, which, though it had its drawbacks, seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top of the envelopes [photo of his girlfriend]) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch, being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love...

 I think some people think this style with all its semi-colons, rather too much, but it is such a good attempt to explain how it feels to be alive, and have death at one's back. I am sure Septimus did not want to die, but he was mad and the medical men simply made him worse, and this story is where V Woolf expresses her anger with regard to her own experiences of being mad. She was mad, at times, and perhaps like Septimus kept hearing messages and seeing faces; absorbed with things that were not there and completely irrational.