Mrs Dalloway - A Q&A with Dr Derek Ryan

1. Why does Mrs Dallowayfeel particularly ripe for adaptation in 2026?

As a novel written in the aftermath of major social and political events – most notably the Great War and the 1918 influenza pandemic – Mrs Dalloway is eerily prescient for our own times. Particularly in the figure of Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf shows us the personal tragedies that result from global catastrophes – a theme that resonates powerfully with contemporary audiences living through an era of multiple armed conflicts. In addition, Woolf’s novel seeks to open up the narrow identity categories of gender, sexuality and nationality that are often weaponised in today’s context of populism and culture wars. There is a lesson for us in Clarrisa’s reluctance to say of others or of herself ‘I am this, I am that’. Woolf’s work provides wonderful possibilities for imaginative staging and performance that is both immersive and confronting.

2. What does Mrs Dalloway offer today’s audiences that feels especially relevant?

Mrs Dalloway asks us to explore our everyday connections, whether these are with the people we know intimately, the strangers we pass in the street, or the sounds and sights of the spaces we inhabit. Today, the divisive online world of social media and near-constant negative news coverage can leave us feeling more isolated than interlinked. But Woolf’s writing is attuned to a collective sensory experience that is rooted to the ground we walk on and the myriad thoughts that pass through our minds in any given moment. She reveals to us how feelings – whether joyful or painful, fleeting or lasting – are always shared, even and especially when we don’t immediately recognise that to be the case.

3. Why do you think audiences continue to connect with Clarissa Dalloway as a character?

Clarissa is someone who has followed a path that is designed as much by societal expectations as it is by her own desires. The sphere she finds herself in offers many privileges – marriage, money, property, status – but it is also a world that she doesn’t feel fully part of as a middle-aged woman who has become, as Peter Walsh predicted, ‘the perfect hostess’. Woolf draws us into Clarissa’s psychology and emotions – her excitements, regrets, sympathies, prejudices, freedoms, constrictions. As with many of Woolf’s most memorable characters, it is Clarrisa’s complex and flawed nature that makes her feel alive on the page. To me, it is the depths and nuances of her character that speak to us more than any question of whether we actually like or dislike her. The several hours we spend in her company seem to span a lifetime.

4. Mrs Dalloway is often described as innovative and even challenging. What made the novel so radical when it was first published – and how do those innovations still shape the way we read it today?

One of the great innovations of this novel is in the way it allows us to view each character through the eyes of multiple other characters. Woolf does this by blending third-person narration with the thoughts or speech of her characters, a technique known as ‘free indirect discourse’ and previously used by novelists she admired such as Jane Austen. Mrs Dalloway shifts between voices and consciousnesses in a fluid way, without handing over narrative authority to any one figure. In doing so, the book demonstrates how our thoughts, and therefore our representation of thoughts through language, are always mediated by our relation to others and to the world around us. What emerges is a great experimental collage, a community of voices, like we see in other modernist masterpieces like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

5. Beyond its reputation as a literary classic, what do you think people sometimes misunderstand about Mrs Dalloway?

I think many people assume that the novel is rather gloomy! Yes, it deals with difficult subject matter including war, trauma, suicide. But everything is infused with life. On each page of this novel, we are presented with the life of London, the life of the mind and body… the life of Woolf’s sentences. This novel is, in my view, a testament to a line Woolf wrote in her diary a few years earlier. Opening with her reflections on a disappointing review of her short story collection, Monday or Tuesday, the entry swiftly moves on to recent happenings and gossip before she notes: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.’ Mrs Dalloway is above all else a life-affirming novel.