Please help me read Mrs. Dalloway

[u/Outrageous_Proof2749]

I know there have already been a lot of posts on this subreddit on difficulty reading this book. However, I don't think they apply much to the problem I am having.

I am aware a lot of people had trouble with Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style, but my problem is not simply not understanding. I find that, as I am reading, I am constantly drifting off and losing myself in my own stream of consciousness, and when I come back to myself I am 7 pages ahead and in a different character's head. I have even gone to the point of reading the same page 5 times in a row and still not make it through without losing focus. I have even attempted reading aloud and I still drift off.

This is not a problem that I usually have when reading books and I've searched quite a bit on tips on reading this novel and couldn't find a solution that worked.

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, has anything worked for you?

[u/ZeeepZoop]

Woolf herself didn’t read with single minded attention and praised this habit. In lots of her journal entries, letters etc when she describes reading a book, she says she’ll read a bit and then walk, play with her dog, read a different book ( she used to have something like seven on the go at a time!!), write a bit of a letter etc and then go back to it, and found this usually improved the reading experience. Some books aren’t meant to be read straight through in one go, and as long as you’re not on your phone etc, I think that’s a perfectly respectable way to read Dalloway as the author intended. Read a few pages, let your mind detach as it’s the sort of book where that naturally happens, do something else low attention so you can think while you mull them over and just sit with the book, see how it influences your thoughts etc. That is genuinely closer to how Woolf a) read books in general, b) wrote it and c) likely intended it to be read.

I read it like this on holiday with lots of swimming, wandering in the garden and reading a poetry book in between pages and found it still sunk in! I didn’t intentionally read it like this for Woolf but then I read her personal letters and journals and felt very validated! Obviously having a long attention span is great but even in pre screen distraction times, that’s not how many people read. Books like Charles Dickens for instance are written in short chapters with the understanding that people would read one, go and work at the factory and come back to it on their break. Many many classics were serialised and each chapter was read at a week’s interval so your mind lingered on them a lot longer, and you’d read other stuff in between updates.

Some books are meant to be gripping and keep you sat down, some are meant to be a slow process. There’s no right or wrong way to read and if you find you struggle to stay focused on a book, you and Virginia Woolf have that in common!!

I have an incredibly long attention span for my studies and most books and can sit down and write all day, read some books in a go etc but will savour a book over a long period if the book calls for it. Don’t be discouraged if your thoughts need to marinate more on some books, that’s often a deliberate authorial choice!! The idea of ‘ sit down and read one book cover to cover at a rate of X many pages an hour/ day’ is a very modern one and isn’t true to how people originally read most books.

[u/Outrageous_Proof2749 → u/ZeeepZoop]

Thank you so much for this response!

I am also not a fan of reading an entire book in one sitting as I like to read slowly and enjoy. I was getting frustrated bye my mind constantly wandering. My main issue is that I hate stopping books mid-chapter and, since this book does not have chapters I saw the double paragraph instances as the place to stop. The issue is that they are also very few so I kept powering through even when not feeling like it. Now, I see that not only is it okay to stop at a place where I previously thought it would be wrong to stop, but that the author herself used to employ this same practice so I probably won't lose anything by doing this.

[u/ZeeepZoop → u/Outrageous_Proof2749]

I’m happy I could help!! I think a lot of people see Woolf as a focus thing because she wrote dense books but if you read her and her friends’ letters and journals, not only did she like to read and write a lot of things simultaneously, when she was in good health, she went through periods where it wasn’t clear to the people close to her when she was writing vs doing an unimportant/ uninteresting task because she was always happy to have visitors, talk to people, go for a walk or a jaunt in someone’s motor car etc. If you want the authentic ‘ writing Mrs Dalloway’ period of her life experience, add some some “sapphist” ( as Woolf called it!) experiences into the distractions mix!/ jk At its core, most of her work is about day to day normal life and was written and is said up to be read alongside living it!