It’s typical of Woolf to take a romantic scene and make it steely—that’s the price, you might say, of inner privacy. Marriage, love, and intimacy only take you so far; at the end of that path, you fall back on the austere, solitary dignity of the inner life. And yet Clarissa prefers austerity to intimacy. She thinks, from time to time, about Peter Walsh, who was in love with her, and whom she might have married instead of Richard. Peter was thoughtful, intellectual, romantic, passionate. He loved to talk, and took her thoughts seriously. He was determined to know her, soul-to-soul. To people who hold intimacy to be the highest good in a relationship, that’s a desirable thing. “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable,” Clarissa thinks. Years later, sitting in the park, she is still rehearsing, in her mind, the arguments she and Peter once had: “Suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?” Richard gives her privacy, and, therefore, inner solitude; he lets her soul remain her own. Of course, he never says “I love you.” Meanwhile, Peter thinks, of Clarissa, that there has always been “this coldness, this woodenness, something very profound in her … an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her.” (The case of Septimus Smith, which makes up roughly half of “Mrs. Dalloway,” shows the saddest consequence of inner privacy: hurt to his core, Septimus remains beyond the reach of even those who would help him.)

At the same time, the benefits of remaining “impenetrable” can be profound. Clarissa, famously, buys the flowers herself, and that allows her to enjoy the coolness, stillness, and beauty of the flower shop; the same, Woolf suggests, happens in Clarissa’s inner life, where her heightened feelings are allowed to stay pure, untouched. Even Peter, with time, comes to regard himself in this way: “The compensation of growing old,” he thinks, is that “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much. Woolf suggests that those treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa, meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment. Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.

Woolf’s abstract, inner sense of privacy bears the stamp, of course, of a very particular time and place (not to mention Woolf’s very particular biography—she had an unusually rich hidden life). It’s indebted to feminism, and to the realization that men, but not women, have long been granted a right to solitude. It also flows from the particularly modernist idea that there is a coherent, hidden, inner self from which art springs. Today, we may be more likely to see art as a collaborative process—the product of a scene, rather than a person. We are also, I suspect, especially aware of how much we rely upon on social networks to help us know ourselves. In recent years, philosophers have argued that other people may know us better than we do.

To me, though, Woolf’s sense of privacy still feels relevant; when I keep it in mind, I see it everywhere. Adelle Waldman’s novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” is, among many other things, a gender-reversed retelling of the love story at the center of “Mrs. Dalloway”: like Clarissa, Nate chooses the lover who can’t know him over the lover who’s determined to. (He does this, in part, so that he can continue to surprise himself—that is, continue to create.) Meanwhile, on Tumblr and Facebook, we seek out the same private sociality that Woolf described. Usually, we think of social media as a forum for exhibitionism. But, inevitably, the extroverted cataloguing of everyday minutiae—meals, workouts, thoughts about politics, books, and music—reaches its own limits; it ends up emphasizing what can’t be shared. Talking so freely about your life helps you to know the weight of those feelings which are too vague, or too spiritual, to express—left unspoken and unexplored, they throw your own private existence into relief. “Sharing” is, in fact, the opposite of what we do: like one of Woolf’s hostesses, we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the solidity of our own private selves.

Every now and then, too, you come across some artwork that expresses Woolf’s sensibility in an altogether different idiom, refreshing it. Since I first stumbled across it a few years ago, I’ve watched Lucinda Williams’s 1989 performance of “Side of the Road” hundreds of times. The song is built around a simple metaphor: Williams is driving down the road with a loved one, and happy to be driving. Still, she wants to pull over to the side of the road and stand there by herself. “I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone,” she sings.

If only for a minute or two, I want to see what it feels like to be without you.

I want to know the touch of my own skin

Against the sun, against the wind. I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs.

I just stood and looked out at the open space, and a farmhouse out a ways.

And I wondered about the people who lived in it,

And I wondered if they were happy and content.

Were there children, and a man and a wife?

Did she love him and take her hair down at night? If I stray away too far from you, don’t go and try to find me.

It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it doesn’t mean I

won’t come back and stay beside you.

It only means I need a little time

To follow that unbroken line,

To a place where the wild things grow,

To a place where I used to always go.

From an entirely different angle, Williams has captured the same idea that we find in Woolf’s novels: that there is no final, satisfying way to balance our need to be known with our need to be alone. The balance is always uncertain and provisional; it’s always a matter of dissatisfaction, give-and-take, and sacrifice. Because an artist’s privacy is a state of mind, rather than a matter of law, there are no rules to help us master it. It’s up to each of us to balance the risks and rewards—to trade, in right proportion, loneliness for freedom, explicability for mystery, and the knowable for the unknown within ourselves.

Photograph by E. O. Hoppe/Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty.