It’s London, 1923. Everyone suddenly looks up.
Every one looked up.
Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters.
Near the beginning of “Mrs. Dalloway,” an ordinary day is disrupted by a technological intrusion. More than a century later, we might relate to this kind of thing, even if we’re more likely to be distracted by the pings and chirps of our portable screens. A sky-writing airplane, quaint as it may seem at first glance, brings us news of our current situation — about how we think, how we interact and how we experience reality.
Originally published in 1925, Virginia Woolf’s novel is about a single, hectic day in the life of an upper-class woman and a motley collection of her fellow Londoners. The book is an acknowledged classic, but what’s startling about looking at it with 21st-century eyes is how modern it feels.
The airplane, arcing across a scene in which Mrs. Dalloway herself barely figures, allows Woolf — and the reader — to experience the randomness, and also the curious coherence, of a speedy and fractured mode of existence. Twenty-first-century readers will be amazed at how familiar all that seems.
So let’s crane our necks with those long-ago Londoners and try to read the writing in the sky.
For a few minutes, looking up is an experience that the people on the streets not far from Regent’s Park in central London have in common.
But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?
A woman holding a baby thinks the plane is advertising baby formula.
“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.
Or perhaps Kreemo, a brand of toffee.
“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker.
Another agrees it is toffee.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—
“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley— or a dancer—
“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley—
Nobody can quite figure out what the airplane is trying to say.
This isn’t a book built around a plot; rather, it follows the eddies and digressions of consciousness, weaving through the minds of its many characters, sifting through their memories, their anxieties, their offhand observations and free associations. Individual moments are wistful, comical, sometimes devastating, but the marvel of the novel is the way they flow into one another, capturing something essential and elusive about the way life in the young 20th century is lived and perceived. Which is: frantically, and with splintered attention.
Lucrezia Warren Smith wonders if the airplane might have some therapeutic value for her husband, Septimus, whose combat experiences in World War I have left him traumatized and mentally fragile.
For Septimus, the plane has cosmic significance.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty!
The airplane rockets away from the city toward the countryside, leaving a few more bursts of thought in its wake, including the scientific speculations of a householder working on his lawn.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory—away the aeroplane shot.
Finally, we alight on Mrs. Dalloway, who missed the passage of the airplane and wonders what everyone else is looking at.
“What are they looking at?” said Clarissa Dalloway to the maid who opened her door.
The answer never arrives.
Really, the question is what — or who — have we been looking at? A random cross section of metropolitan life? A series of carefully curated specimens, meant to illustrate the range of social roles that make up this complex, busy piece of the world? Is there a difference?
Or maybe Woolf is showing how randomness has become an organizing feature of this world, undermining older principles of custom and connection. This is why “Mrs. Dalloway” feels so uncanny. Woolf saw what was coming, and figured out how to show it to us.
Now, thanks to social media, the smartphone and other ubiquitous technologies, we dwell in the perpetual squall of other people’s thoughts. At any given moment, you can scroll through a sampling of human consciousness; the boundaries that separate one mind from another have grown thinner as the tools of communication have evolved.
A novel is an older, enclosed space — a personal space shared by a writer and her readers. Within its confines, Woolf imagines the logic of a world in flux. Her characters are oblivious to the forces eroding the foundations of their familiar settled reality — a mostly stable realm of nations, classes, families and individuals. They go about their sometimes comic, sometimes tragic business, living in their own heads, unaware that they are under surveillance.
Of course, this might describe any fictional beings under the eye of an omniscient narrator. But Woolf’s version of the close third-person point of view feels, in 2025, like more than that. Following the thoughts of those Londoners as they follow the course of that plane resembles scrolling; we read on, endlessly, recursively, without arriving at a conclusive meaning, a secure sense of where we are and who we’re with.
After a hundred years, we’re still struggling to decode the message in the sky.
