Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

1925. Hogarth, 1980.

She joined that gently trudging, vaguely gazing, breeze-kissed company - squirrels perching and preening, sparrow fountains fluttering for crumbs, dogs busy with the railings, busy with each other, while the soft warm air washed over them and lent to the fixed unsurprised gaze with which they received life, something whimsical and mollified.

Walking through the park Maisie's attention is drawn to a shell-shocked ex-soldier and his wife sitting on a bench in the Broad Walk; the man's odd behaviour 'gave her quite a turn'. On another bench a middle-aged man muses on his past life; the ex-soldier has a vision of the dead.

Flush

1933. Penguin, 2000.

At last, with every nerve throbbing and every sense singing, he reached Regent's Park. And then when he saw once more, after years of absence it seemed, grass, flowers and trees, the old hunting cry of the fields hallooed in his ears and he dashed forward to run as he had run in the fields at home. But now a heavy weight jerked at his throat; he was thrown back on his haunches

A cocker spaniel country-born and bred, Flush has been brought to London in 1842 to be a companion for the poet Elizabeth Barrett; a role that largely confines him to the semi-invalid's back bedroom. In this imaginative biography the joy of his first outing is dampened by the discovery that 'where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny top-hats [park keepers], dogs must be led on chains'.

After a second visit, when he resolves to bite Mr. Browning's leg next time he sees him, life takes another dramatic turn and he finds himself in Italy, with Mr. Browning now part of the family.

The Years

1937. Penguin Classics, 2002.

I can remember being told by a very beautiful woman...when she went in to Regent's Park to have an ice...at one of those little round tables laid with a cloth under the trees, the eyes, she said, came through every leaf like the darts of the sun; and her ice was melted!

Sara, 'sallow, angular and plain', says that men never follow her. The period is 1910 - see Galsworthy for the same sort of male behaviour, 'at once forward and shy', in 1887.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf

Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. Hogarth, from 1977.

Regent's Park at 4.30 on a December afternoon is a dreary place. So many purple leaves seem to be flattened on the path. Then the park keepers begin whistling, and I remember being afraid of being shut in, as a child. Then the mist rolls up over the vast open space

There is no doubt that the greatest happiness in the world is walking through Regent's Park on a green, but wet - green but red pink and blue evening - the flower beds I mean emerging from the general misty rain - and making up phrases after a little stimulus from little Mr. Murray among his clothes

Murray was her dressmaker. Other entries in Vol. 4 show that the park was useful for walking off her anger as well as gaining inspiration. Vols. 2, 3 and 5 contain brief references but nothing notable.