Katherine Mansfield did not like Virginia Woolf’s first postwar novel, Night and Day (1919). In fact, it offended her. Set against the backdrop of the campaign for women’s suffrage around 1909 or 1910, Night and Day is an Austen-style story of two contrasting young women’s forays into love and work. ‘The war has never been: that is what [Woolf’s] message is,’ Mansfield wrote to her husband, John Middleton Murry, after she had read it:

I don’t want (G forbid!) mobilisation and the violation of Belgium but the novel can’t just leave the war out. There must have been a change of heart. It is really fearful to me the ‘settling down’ of human beings. I feel in the profoundest sense that nothing can ever be the same – that as artists we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions new moulds for our new thoughts and feelings.

Woolf would later call the novel an ‘exercise in the conventional style’. Shut up at home in Richmond as she recovered from a nervous breakdown, Woolf could hear the distant boom of artillery fire in northern France as she wrote out the manuscript in bed, by hand, between early 1915 and late 1918. But if she was following news of ‘mobilisation’ or ‘the violation of Belgium’ in the papers, they made it into her novel only as rows of books, ‘orderly as regiments of soldiers’, or as a suffrage society mounting an ‘offensive’ against ‘the enemy’.

Mansfield was almost as scathing in her review for the Athenæum, at that time edited by Murray. ‘We had thought that this world had vanished for ever,’ she wrote: ‘that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what had been happening.’ Time has not rehabilitated Night and Day. It remains Woolf’s least read and least popular novel. For her part, Woolf brushed off Mansfield’s criticism in public, but privately it wounded her deeply. Despite the sometimes frosty tenor of the two women’s friendship, Mansfield was a writer Woolf admired immensely. Whenever the two of them conversed, she once wrote, she had ‘the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from [Katherine’s] mind the second after I’ve spoken’.

In 1922 Woolf published the experimental Jacob’s Room, which recounts the life story of its aptly named protagonist, Jacob Flanders, from Scarborough via Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn to his death in combat, all without ever describing Jacob directly. Then 100 years ago this month, came Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf’s masterpiece. A high modernist work of impressionist fiction, narrated from a wide-roving narrative point of view, Mrs Dalloway was Woolf’s answer to Ulysses and The Waste Land,  its subject a city and a people scarred by war. No other work of fiction better captures the ‘change of heart’ the First World War visited on Britain. And, as if in direct defiance of Mansfield, it was precisely by ‘leav[ing] the war out’ that Woolf did so.

Mrs Dalloway has three protagonists. The first is the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway, whom we follow around London one hot afternoon in ‘the middle of June’, 1923, as she prepares to host a society party that evening. The second is Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s ‘old friend’ and spurned admirer, who knocks on her door that morning, unexpectedly, having just returned from five years living in India. The third is Septimus Warren Smith, ‘aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed’ and shell-shocked.

Unlike the minor characters into whose minds Woolf’s free indirect discourse roves (Richard Dalloway, MP; the teenaged Elizabeth Dalloway; Elizabeth’s dowdy history teacher, ‘poor Miss Kilman’…), Septimus bears no relation at all to Clarissa. We meet him on Bond Street, where Clarissa goes to buy flowers. He is standing on the opposite side of the road with his Italian wife, Lucrezia, paralysed by his sense that ‘the world [is] waver[ing] and quiver[ing] and threaten[ing] to burst into flames’. Septimus’ plot converges with Clarissa’s and Peter’s only in the very last pages of the novel, when his psychiatrist, Sir William Bradshaw, arrives late to the Dalloways’ party. Lady Bradshaw recounts, third-hand, to Clarissa the terrible event we readers have just witnessed: ‘just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone,’ she says. It was ‘a very sad case’: a ‘young man […] had killed himself’.

‘Oh!’ thinks Clarissa, ‘in the middle of my party, here’s death.’ And here, indeed, is ‘the European War’, which she and her guests have spent the whole novel endeavouring not to think about. ‘The War was over,’ announces the narrator, channelling Clarissa, in the opening pages. Over, that is, ‘except for some one like Mrs Foxcroft’, whom Clarissa had encountered at ‘the embassy last night’, and who was ‘eating her heart out for that nice boy who was killed’. Rushing home from a parliamentary committee to tell his wife that he loves her, Richard thinks: ‘Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle.’ Then he switches to thinking about something else.

This is the ‘settling down’ of human beings to which Mansfield referred: our tendency to deny the truths that cause us grief; our desire to carry on as if nothing has changed. We would be wrong if we assumed Woolf approved of this attitude. In fact, when the Dalloways made their first appearance in her work, in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), the couple is an obvious satire of Edwardian high society. Clarissa is based in large part on the socialite Kitty Maxse, who had been a friend of Woolf’s parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen. Before they join The Voyage Out’s main characters aboard their steam ship, she and Richard, we are told, ‘had mounted mules’ in Spain, ‘for they wished to understand how the peasants lived’. More specifically, whether ‘the peasants’ are ‘ripe for rebellion’.

In Mrs Dalloway, their edges are softened; Woolf understands their pasts and their pathologies better. Deep in the ‘struggle’ of working up the first draft, she wrote in her diary of ‘what I call my tunelling process’: ‘how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters’ then ‘tell the past’ to the reader ‘by instalments’. Perhaps Maxse’s (apparently accidental) fall down a flight of stairs to her death in 1922 awakened a gentler feeling towards her in Woolf. She writes particularly movingly of young Clarissa’s passion for her friend, Sally Seton (she had just fallen, hard, for Vita Sackville-West). ‘The most exquisite moment of [Clarissa’s] life’ came when ‘Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips’. That kiss was ‘a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up’; its ‘radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!’ Much of the pathos of the novel’s first half derives from Clarissa and Peter’s mutual longing to return to those prewar, pre-Dalloway summer days, when Peter loved Clarissa and Clarissa loved Sally.

Then into all this longing stumbles war-ruined Septimus. A car backfiring in the street sends him into paroxysms of terror. He believes he sees his dead comrade, Evans, in the park. He believes ‘the leaves [are] alive; the trees [are] alive’. These are the symptoms we associate with shell shock: crippling anxiety and paranoid delusions. But Septimus is more a creature of Shakespeare than of modern psychiatry. Before the war, he fell in love with a Miss Isabel Pole, who ‘lectur[es] in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare’; he volunteers in 1914, the narrator tells us, ‘to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square’. He returns from France as the archetypal Fool who speaks the truth. Septimus is the only character in Mrs Dalloway who really reckons with the war: with ‘the voices of the dead’; with ‘how wicked people are’.

Mrs Dalloway depicts a world in the wake of a catastrophe, but a catastrophe which virtually no one can acknowledge. One ‘[gets] over things’, as Peter assures himself. Life ‘ha[s] a habit of adding day to day’.

Still, a ‘change of heart’ is unmistakable. The Clarissa of Woolf’s debut, The Voyage Out, sparkles, is fascinated by everyone. When she sleeps it is always ‘extremely sound and satisfying’. She gives the young protagonist, Rachel, a copy of Persuasion (1817), Austen’s paean to second chances and enduring youthful passion. Mrs Dalloway’s Clarissa, in contrast, is preoccupied by mortality. Walking along Bond Street she is seized by the thought that, one day, ‘she must inevitably cease completely’; that, after her death, ‘all this must go on without her’. ‘Icy claws […] fix in her’ as she gazes in the mirror, and she tries to reassure herself ‘she [is] not old yet’.

Just because we deny a traumatic event’s significance does not mean that we can escape from its effects. That is what Mrs Dalloway’s message is. ‘This late age of the world’s experience’, as Clarissa refers to the war in typically euphemistic terms, ‘bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.’ The scars of war are most visible in Mrs Dalloway when its characters try to hide them. As Alexandra Harris writes in her 2011 biography, Woolf is still sometimes ‘criticised for not facing directly enough the great conflicts of her time’, but ‘all her postwar novels are concerned with the indirections by which we come to understand our losses’.

A hundred years on from Mrs Dalloway’s publication, that concern with ‘indirections’ is as pertinent as ever. The lasting effects of Covid-19 and the lockdowns are all around us, every day. Loneliness. Ill-health. Contracting standards of living. But how often do we speak or read or write about 2020? All of it, pace Woolf, we have ‘already half forgotten’.

It is this enduring insight that makes Mrs Dalloway a masterpiece. Woolf wrote it quickly, in a burst of creative energy. The only roadblock came in January of 1923, when news reached England of Mansfield’s death at 34. When Woolf sat down to her manuscript, the next morning, there seemed all of a sudden to be ‘no point in writing’. No point anymore, because ‘Katherine won’t read it’.