Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia WoolfIn Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes that she later develops in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway she added the theme of madness. As Woolf said: “I am here sketching a study of madness and suicide; the world seen side by side by the sane and the insane. » However, even the theme that would lead Woolf to create a double for Clarissa Dalloway can be seen as a progression of other similar ideas cultivated in Jacob's Room. Woolf's next novel was therefore a natural development of Jacob's Room, as well as an expansion of the short stories she had written before deciding to make Mrs. Dalloway into a full-length novel. The Dalloways had been introduced in the novel The Voyage Out, but Woolf presented the couple in a harsher light than she did in later years. Richard is domineering and pompous. Clarissa is dependent and superficial. Some of these qualities remain in Mrs. Dalloway's characters but both generally seem much more reasonable and sympathetic. Clarissa was modeled after a friend of Woolf's named Kitty Maxse, whom Woolf considered a superficial socialite. Although she wanted to comment on the unpleasant social system, Woolf sometimes found it difficult to respond to a character like Clarissa. She discovered greater depth in the character of Clarissa Dalloway in a series of short stories, the first of which was titled "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," published in 1923. The story would serve as an experimental first chapter for Mrs. Dalloway. A large number of similar short stories followed and the novel soon became inevitable..