How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The name Mrs. Dalloway had been Richard's idea—a conceit tossed off one drunken dormitory night as he assured her that Vaughan was nor the proper name for her. She should, he'd said, be named after a great figure in literature, and while she'd argued for Isabel Archer or Anna Karenina, Richard had insisted that Mrs. Dalloway was the singular and obvious choice. There was the matter of her existing first name, a sign too obvious to ignore, and, more important, the larger question of fate. (1.4)
As he creates his late twentieth-century echo of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham offers a plausible reason why Clarissa Vaughan can be called Mrs. Dalloway. According to Richard Brown, "[s]he, Clarissa, was clearly not destined to make a disastrous marriage or fall under the wheels of a train. She was destined to charm, to prosper. So Mrs. Dalloway it was and would be" (1.4).
Quote #2
"Nice to see you," Walter says. Clarissa knows—she can practically see—that Walter is, at this moment, working mentally through a series of intricate calibrations regarding her personal significance. Yes, she's the woman in the book, the subject of a much-anticipated novel by an almost legendary writer, but the book failed, didn't it? It was curtly reviewed; it slipped silently beneath the waves. She is, Walter decides, like a deposed aristocrat, interesting without being particularly important. (1.11)
Richard Brown doesn't just rename Clarissa Vaughan after "a great figure in literature" (1.4): he also tries to immortalize her in a novel of his own—one that also sounds like it has a whole lot in common with Mrs. Dalloway, by the way.
Quote #3
Richard will never admit to nor recover from his dislike of her, never; he will never discard his private conviction that Clarissa has, at heart, become a society wife, and never mind the fact that she and Sally do not attempt to disguise their love for anyone's sake, or that Sally is a devoted, intelligent woman, a producer of public television, for heaven's sake […]. Never mind the good, flagrantly unprofitable books Clarissa insists on publishing alongside the pulpier items that pay her way. Never mind her politics, all her work with PWAs. (1.29)
Clarissa Vaughan seems to be a professional literary editor and publisher, and it's clear that her life is as tied up in literature and writing as are the lives of the novel's author figures, Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown. Like Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard, Clarissa devotes herself to the task of getting worthwhile books printed and out into the world.