Reality is something very erratic very undependable now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and takes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly, Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to dis-cern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway captures this sense of reality. She has sieved through the subtle thoughts and events in one wo-man's life and paralleled those subtleties with those of Septimus Smith, a one-time poet and clerk as an estate and land agent. Though the alternating plots appear disjointed, Woolf manages to manipulate them so they connect and in so doing she forces the reader to reflect more, to search deeper. Through the "bird-like" Clarissa Dalloway and the hunched, "hawk-like" form of Septimus, Virginia Woolf has dealt with the universal theme of Time, and thus broadened the sympathies of all her readers. But most importantly, she has stressed there is a Septimus or Clarissa in each of us - that in their search for "a joy of life," a "sense of proportion" she is speaking to all of us.
Time, the past as well as the present, play an important part in Clarissa Dalloway's life. In her present existence she seeks to find a joy of life, a sense of reality, in the streets of London, "in he people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar..." But like Mrs. Wilson in Forester's Howard's End, Clarissa reverts to, almost worships the past. She combines her past life at Bourton with her present London surroundings. And there...