So occupied with what other persons are occupied with

When Virginia Woolf was writing the novel she eventually called Mrs. Dalloway, she hadn't yet decided to call it that. Her working title for the in-progress manuscript was The Hours. 

It's not clear what prompted her to make the switch. Either title would've been fine: Mrs. Dalloway works because it alerts you to the fact that the novel is largely focused on Clarissa Dalloway, and it also primes you for Woolf's psychologically immersive writing style. (When you read Mrs. Dalloway, you read Mrs. Dalloway, inhabiting Clarissa's consciousness via her narrated stream of thoughts.) The Hours would've worked, too, because it alerts you to one of the novel's most prominent themes (the nature of time; how our perception of time's passing affects us), and it also primes you for the structure of the novel, which -- like James Joyce's Ulysses -- all takes place over the course of one day. Throughout the novel, Big Ben regularly strikes out to announce the time, the clock's "leaden circles dissolv[ing] in the air."

For most people (nay, all people) this is nothing more than a literary-historical fun fact. However, because I routinely name-check Mrs. Dalloway as my favorite novel, I've developed a Hot Take™ on this subject:

Mrs. Dalloway is an inferior title. I wish Woolf had stuck with The Hours. (And not just because it left the opening for Michael Cunningham to steal the title for himself and derivatively ride Woolf's coattails to literary fame. (Belated second Hot Take™ alert!))

The problem with Mrs. Dalloway is that the title misleadingly suggests that the novel is only about Clarissa, when really, the book follows two central characters, Clarissa and a struggling WWI veteran named Septimus Smith. We spend nearly as much of the book in Septimus's fragmented mind as we do in Clarissa's more orderly consciousness, hopping back and forth between the two.

Clarissa and Septimus don't know each other and never meet. While Clarissa spends the day running errands in preparation for the large party she'll be hosting in the evening, Septimus wanders the streets of London in a traumatized haze, accompanied by his worried wife Rezia, agitated by psychiatrists who neither respect nor comprehend what he feels and needs. It's Septimus, not Clarissa, who ushers in the novel's late climax: feeling unbearably oppressed by Dr. Holmes, he throws himself out a window and impales himself on the gate below. Later, at her party, Clarissa overhears a couple guests talking about the "young man who had killed himself" and mulls over how someone could fling life away like "a shilling into the Serpentine." 

That moment at the party is the only point in the novel where our two protagonists' lives directly intersect. For the rest of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa's and Septimus's narratives are like opposing sides of a double helix, removed from each other, unfolding in parallel. Woolf wields the juxtaposition differently than you might expect: for example, she doesn't use the severity of Septimus's condition to indict Clarissa's party-planning as shallow and frivolous, nor does she use Clarissa's psychological "normalcy" to make Septimus seem freakish or pitiable. Instead, Woolf uses each character to lend the other complexity, to gently reveal what is shared between them. 

For all their obvious differences, Septimus and Clarissa embrace a similar existential outlook, something Woolf teases throughout the novel but makes plain in the wake of his suicide. After hearing about the death, Clarissa seeks out an empty room to sort through the feelings it elicits: "Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear... Somehow it was her disaster -- her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress." For Clarissa, Septimus's death provokes empathetic sadness and self-preservational alarm, reactions that give dignity to his life and suffering without endorsing his actions. The novel takes on a core premise of humanity -- "the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known," the knowledge that "one is alone" -- and shows two characters navigating that reality, using their disparate experiences to reflect on how we're connected to one another and what we owe to each other.

It's a great book, guys. And, of course, all of that is in the novel regardless of what it's titled. Mrs. Dalloway or The Hours -- the book is the book.

That said, every now and then, when I manage to come across people familiar with the novel, I tend to see Mrs. Dalloway described rather flippantly as a book about a lady throwing a party. This characterization is unfair to Clarissa (who makes brushes with feminist consciousness and flinches when a friend refers to her as the "perfect hostess") and disastrous for poor Septimus, whose prominent and tragic role gets totally forgotten. Re-branded as The Hours, I think the book would be getting a fairer shake.