What happens to Mrs. Dalloway (spoilers, probably)

A really smart guy in one of my college English classes – I don’t remember his name, but Columbia scholar Ed Mendelson probably does – came up with the novel idea that at the ending Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Clarissa Dalloway dies. It seems an odd interpretation, but going back over the novel there are a # of ominous hints about CD’s ill health and her feeling of exhaustion and depletion. More notably, and more unusual, she seems to disappear from the narrative in the final section, which is to say she disappears from the party that she’s been so invested in managing – a huge success, apparently I part because the Prime Minister makes an appearance. But over the 40 or so pp. that constitute the party, we move – in the moving, fluid “stream of consciousness” into various perspectives – Clarissa’s old friend and lover Peter Walsh, ditto Sally (now a matronly mother of 5 boys), with touches of the old blowhard Hugh with his sinecure job “polishing the royal boots” or some such jab, the aging Parliamentarian and career-stymied husband Richard, plus some new characters such as the woman who stays till the end and is eager to report the goings-on and who-was-there’s to her friend . We also get a visit from the eminent psychiatrist who was unable to prevent Septimus’s suicidal leap and his gruesome death. But where is Clarissa? For some unexplained reason she absents herself from the party and goes into her bedroom where she looks from her window to on older woman across the way getting ready for bed. But is she really across the way, or is the window pane reflecting back to Clarissa her own image – old, and ready to “retire”? That seemed to me exactly the correct interpretation, that is, until we get to the last sentences of the novel and several of her admirers gaze up at the staircase and there is Clarissa. VW ends this novel abruptly and with no fanfare, leaving many readers, I imagine, to think: So what. Is that all there is? Woman gives party? Though I have to say the evidence in the text for Clarissa’s death just doesn’t hold up – but the image of death is at the heart of this novel. It would amount to nothing, or at least to much less, except for the death of Septimus, and what his (mis)treatment says about the culture and its inability to recognize and rectify the suffering of others.