The Early Life of Septimus Smith

While recent criticism has made an effort to highlight Virginia Woolf’s political engagements, we are still trying to account for the oddly insubstantial presence of the Great War in Mrs. Dalloway. This essay responds to the critical tradition of reading Mrs. Dalloway as a postwar elegy by arguing that the First World War enters the text primarily as a trope for traumas inherent to its characters’ encounters with language and otherness. I examine the manuscript drafts of “The Hours,” particularly Woolf’s earliest sketches of Septimus’s youth, to show that the war functions as a metaphor for complex metaphysical and linguistic alienations that have defined him since long before the war, particularly his disillusionment with Romantic and fin-de-siècle forms of expression.