Clarissa Dalloway

Clarissa Dalloway, a woman fifty-two years old and chic, but disconcerted over life and love. A June day in her late middle years is upsetting to Mrs. Dalloway, uncertain as she is about her daughter and her husband’s love, her own feelings for them, and her feelings for her former fiancé, lately returned from India. Years before, Peter Walsh had offered her agony and ecstasy, though not comfort or social standing, and so she had chosen Richard Dalloway. Now, seeing Peter for the first time in many years, her belief in her motives and her peace of mind are gone. Engaged in preparations for a party, she knows her life is frivolous, her need for excitement neurotic, and her love dead. Meeting her best friend, Sally Seton, also makes her realize that their love was abnormal as is her daughter’s for an older woman. Although she knows that her husband’s love for her is real and solid, she feels that death is near, that growing old is cruel, that life can never be innocently good again.

Richard Dalloway

Richard Dalloway, her politician husband, a Conservative Member of Parliament. Never to be a member of the Cabinet or a prime minister, Richard is a good man who has improved his character, his disposition, his life. Loving his wife deeply but silently, he is able only to give her a conventional bouquet of roses to show his feeling, a fortunate gift because roses are the one flower she can stand to see cut. Devoted to his daughter, he sees her infatuation as a passing thing, an adolescent emotional outlet. He is gently persuasive among his constituents and colleagues, and in thought and deed a thoroughly good man.

Peter Walsh

Peter Walsh, a widower lately returned from India to make arrangements for the divorce of a major’s wife, a woman half his age whom he plans to marry, again an action to fill the void left by Clarissa. Perceptive and quick to understand motives for unhappiness, Peter sees his return to England as another step in his failure to live without Clarissa. Unnerved by seeing her again, he blurts out his recent history, and he continues the cruel probe all day and that night at her party.

Septimus Warren Smith

Septimus Warren Smith, a war casualty who commits suicide on the night of Mrs. Dalloway’s party and delays the arrival of one of the guests, a doctor. A poet and a brave man, Septimus brings back to England an Italian war bride whom he cannot really love, all feeling having been drained from him by the trauma of war. He is extremely sensitive to motives; to Septimus, his doctors represent the world’s attempt to crush him, to force him into conventionality. Feeling abandoned and unable to withstand even the devotion of his lovely wife, he jumps to his death, a martyr to the cause of individuality, of sensitivity to feelings and beauty.

Lucrezia Smith

Lucrezia Smith, called Rezia, the Italian wife whom Smith met in Milan and married after the war. Desperately in love with her husband, she tries to give him back his former confidence in human relations, takes him to doctors for consultation, and hopes to prevent his collapse and suicide.

Elizabeth Dalloway

Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter who has none of her mother’s charm or vivacity and all of her father’s steady attributes. Judged to be handsome, the sensible seventeen-year-old appears mature beyond her years; her thoughtfulness directly contradicts her mother’s frivolity. She is until this day enamored of Miss Kilman, a desperate and fanatical older woman who is in love with Elizabeth but conceals her feelings under the guise of religiosity and strident charity. On the day of the party, Elizabeth sees Miss Kilman’s desire for power and escapes from the woman’s tyranny of power and need. That night, Elizabeth blossoms forth in womanly radiance so apparent that her father fails to recognize his conception of a daughter.

Doris Kilman

Doris Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway’s tutor and friend, an embittered, frustrated spinster whose religious fanaticism causes her to resent all the things she could not have or be. With a lucid mind and intense spirit largely given to deep hatreds of English society, she represents a caricature of womanly love and affection, a perversion.

Lady Rosseter

Lady Rosseter, nee Sally Seton, the old friend with whom Mrs. Dalloway had believed herself in love when she was eighteen. Sally has always known that Clarissa made the wrong choice and has always been aware of the shallowness of her friend’s existence. Mellowed now, Sally and Peter Walsh can see the pattern of life laid out before them at the party, and they console each other for loss of girlhood friend and beloved.

Dr. Holmes

Dr. Holmes, Septimus Smith’s physician. Brisk and insensitive, he fails to realize the seriousness of his patient’s condition. Puzzled because Smith does not respond to prescriptions of walks in the park, music halls, and bromides at bedtime, he sends him to consult Sir William Bradshaw.

Sir William Bradshaw

Sir William Bradshaw, a distinguished specialist who devotes three-quarters of an hour to each of his patients. Ambitious for worldly position but apathetic as a healer, he shuts away the mad, forbids childbirth, and advises an attitude of proportion in sickness and in health. Because of Septimus Smith’s suicide, he and his wife arrive late at Mrs. Dalloway’s party.

Lady Millicent Bruton

Lady Millicent Bruton, a fashionable Mayfair hostess. A dabbler in charities and social reform, she is sponsoring a plan to have young men and women immigrate to Canada.

Hugh Whitbread

Hugh Whitbread, a friend of the Dalloways and a minor official at court.

Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is a sophisticated, fashionable, upper-class wife and an impeccable hostess. The narrator describes her as having a "virginity preserved through childbirth." As her day unfolds with the details of the party, Woolf delves into Clarissa's many fluctuating moods and memories. These are contrasted with the perspectives and opinions of other characters in the story, as well as the emotional shifts Clarissa experiences throughout her day. For instance, Clarissa frequently recalls a day in June 1889 when she was eighteen and involved with Peter Walsh. She becomes fixated on these memories and her decision not to marry him, as he is set to return to London. Additionally, she sees a reflection of her younger self in her eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, who is poised to enter society.

Clarissa's relationship with her husband Richard is considerate and kind, yet there are verbal and emotional boundaries they do not cross. Their love is strong because they have nurtured it carefully. However, this love also serves as a barrier—self-imposed yet protective—that binds them loosely.

Richard Dalloway dreams of being a country gentleman, but he cannot demand this life for himself. His vision of a rural existence is a lost dream because he finds more security in his government position and his life with his genteel wife. Similarly, Clarissa harbors a lost dream: she wishes to break free from her fears about men, women, and life to find happiness. She realized long ago that she lacked the courage to join Peter in his adventurous zest for life, so she married Richard to pursue life in her introspective and reflective manner.

Peter Walsh, a Socialist and aspiring writer, returns to London after a five-year stay in India. Through his eyes, we witness many of the changes in Clarissa and the social transformations that have occurred since the war. Walsh, who is six months older than Clarissa, reacts to his age with a defiant midlife romance with a married woman in India, young enough to be his daughter. Constantly fiddling with a pocket knife that symbolizes his masculinity, he fantasizes about sex and contemplates the social changes he observes since the war.

The adventurous and bold Sally Seton, Clarissa's childhood friend, joins the party alongside Lady Brouton, her politically active hostess friend, and Miss Kilman, her scholarly spinster friend and tutor. Despite their presence, it is the contrast with Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran who hears sparrows singing in Greek and ultimately ends his life by leaping from a window, that creates a parallel with Clarissa. Woolf herself emphasized this parallel in her writing notebook, stating, "Mrs D seeing the truth. SS seeing insane truth." Septimus Smith represents insanity in this exploration of the sane and the insane. He went to war to defend his country and prove his manhood, but he was defeated. Clarissa, on the other hand, did not go to war; she retreated and married a secure man who wouldn't challenge her to be more than she thought she could be.

Both Septimus and Clarissa feel like outsiders in society, as if they are rushing headlong through life. They experience alternating moments of great happiness and deep anxiety and fear. Woolf reveals the terror in Septimus' heart and connects it to what is most important to Clarissa: the ability to feel. What horrifies Septimus is his inability to feel. To protect themselves, both characters share a strong belief that no one should hold power over them, driven by their intense fear of domination.