Professor Anna Snaith takes a deep dive into what makes Mrs Dalloway as poignant in the 2020s as it was when published back in the 1920s.
Virginia Woolf is an iconic writer and feminist. Mrs Dalloway, of all her novels, has done most to confer that iconic status. The novel sold well: allowing Woolf to install a water closet (‘Mrs Dalloway’s closet’) at Monk’s House, her home in Sussex. Within a few years the first translations began to appear, and the novel’s global journeys began. A century on from its publication on May 14, 1925, the numerous rewritings and adaptations attest to the book’s continued relevance. From novelistic homages such as Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Hours (1998) or Asali Solomon’s Days of Afrekete (2021) to its multi-media migrations in Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works or Stephen Daldry’s film of The Hours (2002).
Mrs Dalloway has had this rich afterlife because of Woolf’s prescience: the many political and socio-cultural issues on which she was ahead of her time. And this is not to mention the experimental formal qualities of the novel: its blurring of temporality, its forays into the minds of the characters, its setting on a single day in June 1923. We might think about the queer politics of the novel: Clarissa’s remembered and treasured kiss with Sally Seton and its erotic revitalisation in the present. Or the representation of what we would now call PTSD in traumatized First World War veteran, Septimus Smith. Woolf was not only topical in her use of the term ‘shell shock’ but radical in her capacity to ‘hear’ and represent the ongoing trauma of trench warfare given the interwar associations between shell shock and cowardice or malingering.
The novel is also experimental in its centring of a middle-aged woman as one half of her paired protagonists. Clarissa Dalloway, society hostess and wife of a Conservative MP, ‘had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying; no more having of children now […] this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway’. We learn that she is 52 and experiencing menopausal symptoms, a topic only recently beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Clarissa is made to lie down in the day: ‘He returned with a pillow and a quilt. “An hour’s complete rest after luncheon”’ […] he would go on saying “An hour’s complete rest after luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once’. Woolf is astute on the medicalisation and pathologizing of women’s health as Clarissa is infantilised and silenced.
Mrs Dalloway is also a ‘pandemic’ novel: another reason it resonates so keenly with our post-COVID-19 moment. Woolf and Clarissa are both survivors of the post-World War One influenza pandemic (known as the ‘Spanish Flu’) which infected a third of the global population and caused an estimated 50-100 million deaths. We learn that Clarissa had ‘grown very white since her illness’ ‘her heart, affected, they said, by influenza’. Her sheer joy at walking London’s summer streets and mixing with crowds of passersby is a legacy of the pandemic as is the sense of loss and tolling of bells that echo through the novel.
Jen Hayes’ multi-media, immersive and interactive stage adaptation of Mrs Dalloway, starring Kit Green, joins a century of re-voicings and reworkings of Woolf’s remarkable novel. New contexts and synergies will emerge as it is reanimated for our present moment. And perhaps Michael Cunningham’s description of his method is apt here: ‘what I wanted to do was more akin to music, to jazz, where a musician will play improvisations on a great piece of existing music from the past, not to reinvent it, not to lay any kind of direct claim to it, but to honour it’ (Cunningham, ‘First Love’ in The Mrs Dalloway Reader, ed. F. Prose (NY: Harvest, 136-7, 2003).
Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London.
Tickets for Mrs Dalloway are now available to book – head to storyhouse.com/whats-on/mrs-dalloway.