Design for Mrs. Dalloway

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)

Design for Mrs. Dalloway

Ink and graphite on paper, ca. 1925

Cut flowers are an important motif in Mrs. Dalloway. The novel opens with Clarissa Dalloway’s excursion through the bustling streets of London to buy flowers for the party she will host later that day. (In the earliest stories, she’s on an errand to buy gloves.) She chooses among “delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations . . . ” at Mulberry’s the florists, a heady and fresh sanctuary amid the city’s hubbub. Flowers appear again as a gift from Mrs. Dalloway’s husband, and in her recollections of Sally Seton, an early love (modeled on Woolf’s first love, Margaret Vaughan). Vanessa Bell incorporated the motif in the dust jacket for the book, as seen in this preliminary design.