Clarissa's “plunge” into London on the first page of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) offers a rallying point for critics intent on establishing Woolf as a writer of the modern city, the subject of last year's conference. “I love walking in London,” Clarissa says in the opening pages; “Really it's better than walking in the country” (MD 6). But Clarissa's opening “plunge,” of course, echoes an earlier “plunge” through the French windows “at Bourton into the open air” when she was eighteen (3). By allowing the image of that childhood garden to dominate the opening pages of her novel, Woolf shows readers the real contours of the walks that take place in Mrs. Dalloway. The choice of London walks over country ones is a red herring; for Clarissa, walking is simply inextricable from memories of country life. Although Morris Beja offered a fantastic sketch of “The London of Mrs. Dalloway” in the Spring 1977 Virginia Woolf Miscellany, London is not the only, or even the primary, terrain of the novel. Beneath the cityscape lies a prior, natural landscape that resonates throughout Mrs. Dalloway. As the curious phrase “plunged at Bourton into the open air” makes clear, Bourton, for Clarissa, is the outdoors, and it is the grounds of her childhood home, which Clarissa remembers so vividly, that underlie the motorcars and shops of Mrs. Dalloway's London.

But here we should pause to consider Clarissa's hesitation. She does, of course, eventually sally forth into London, but Woolf does not make that movement explicit in the novel, as she does in the earlier “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). Whereas in the short story we watch as Clarissa “stepped out into the street” (CSF 152), in the novel the memories of Bourton replace that action. And in those memories Woolf draws us back to a moment in which Clarissa paused on the edge of that natural space. As Deborah Guth observes in “‘What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Fiction as Self–Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway,” “Woolf portrays Clarissa's sense of plunging with such intensity that the reader, momentarily lost in the syntax of the phrase, almost overlooks the fact that immediately after this she is still standing at the window, looking and just looking” (25).