Believe it or not, Mrs. Dalloway might be one of my favorite books to teach. It definitely presents many challenges. It doesn’t divide neatly into chapters. It’s non-linear. It’s written in a stream of consciousness. Students struggle with it. Honestly, many teachers struggle with it! Common approaches, such as teaching the traditional plot arc (Freytag’s Pyramid) or teaching character development, simply don’t work with Mrs. Dalloway. The real difficulty students face when reading this novel is that they don’t understand its structure. The problem isn’t that students can’t read Mrs. Dalloway. It’s that they don’t yet know how to read a novel that isn’t built like a novel they’ve seen before.
The key move for me was to approach the novel’s structure rather than teach its style. While Woolf is experimenting stylistically in this novel, she’s doing much more than trying out stream of consciousness. She is playing with time and perspective. Characters’ thoughts turn to the past and move back to the present as seamlessly as our own. She follows the thoughts of several characters all at once. Moments that take place over seconds are stretched across pages. She juxtaposes the past and the present, characters, and events. Patterns reveal themselves. Once students see the structure, the novel becomes readable.
I approach teaching Mrs. Dalloway with three strands: Time and the Persistence of Memory; Sanity, Illness, and Social Authority; and Social Performance and Private Identity. These strands converge at the novel’s end when Clarissa learns of Septimus’s death at her party.
Time and the Persistence of Memory approaches the chiming of Big Ben as structure, not simply background. Memory consistently interrupts the present, as Clarissa thinks about her kiss with Sally and her days at Bourton. Time is pressure, not just a sequence of moments.
Sanity, Illness, and Social Authority focuses on teaching Septimus’s story not as a side plot but as a critical element of the story. In Septimus’s arc, institutions, represented by Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, define “normal” and exert their authority. The language of authority matters: Bradshaw controls his patients through Proportion and Conversion.
Social Performance and Private Identity examines Clarissa’s performance at her party. It focuses on how she appears publicly, in contrast to her private thoughts, and treats the party as the novel’s structural convergence.
These strands give students a way to track patterns throughout the novel rather than reading it as a series of disconnected moments. They begin to see how Woolf builds meaning structurally rather than through plot.
One example lesson I teach introduces students to Woolf’s use of time as a structural force rather than a background detail through a close reading of the introduction of Big Ben’s chimes, a motif that runs through the novel.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Students take apart the first sentence. What do these two parts suggest about time? Why construct the sentence in two parts? I play the Westminster chimes of Big Ben for students and ask them what it might be like to hear those chimes marking every hour of your life. Students invariably notice the pressure that time exerts when marked in this way, but also, there is a collective experience—time is a shared experience. Structurally, the sentence also prepares students for how to read this novel as a whole. I guide students to pay attention to the semicolon, acting as a hinge.
Students then analyze the novel’s beginning in small groups. They track how Woolf moves in and out of Clarissa’s mind, identifying where those shifts occur, what triggers them, and what changes as a result. It’s important to affirm that students do not need to be right; they just need to notice the structural movement.
As a class, we examine the Trigger → Shift → Effect pattern as a way of tracking how Woolf moves between consciousnesses. We discuss patterns, noting external triggers (such as sounds, movements, memory cues) and how they lead to an internal shift. Then we discuss the emotional or temporal effect of that shift.
I guide students to notice that time does not move linearly, and they reflect on how Woolf’s description of Big Ben suggests that time exerts pressure on characters.
When I approach the novel through structural focus, students stop asking “What is happening?” and start to notice “Why is Woolf structuring the novel this way?” Students can grasp concepts such as structure, meaning, and complexity with this focus.
When I first taught this novel, I didn’t know how to approach it and resorted to cobbling lessons together based on a few things I could find online. Over time, I realized I needed a more coherent way to teach the novel—not just a series of lessons, but a structure that helped students build understanding across the unit. I ended up building a full unit organized around these ideas, including lesson plans, slides, and multiple assessment pathways.
My full Mrs. Dalloway unit includes lesson plans, slides, and assessments built around this structure.
Teaching this novel matters, even in an age when students increasingly struggle to focus and are losing reading stamina. Students deserve opportunities to meaningfully experience difficult reading. Understanding structure is a skill they can transfer to other reading—and other complex texts. It’s worthwhile: when this novel hits, it cracks open new worlds for students.