Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf - Part 1

At the age of 40 Virginia Woolf was a prominent figure in post first world war London. She had published several novels, and was a well known commentator and critic. She came from literary aristocracy - her father was Leslie Stephen, who had married William Thackeray’s daughter, and with her husband Leonard Woolf, she was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, which included her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s artist husband Clive, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant.  But then in 1925 everything changed; she published Mrs Dalloway, in which she told the story of the experience of one woman’s life for one day in June 1923 in London. The New Yorker described it as “one of the few great innovations in the history of the novel”. The text uses modernist techniques of multiple viewpoints and cinematic sweeps and takes us in and out of the minds and feelings of a group of individuals whose lives intersect during the day. Beautiful, haunting and superbly executed, it explores issues of memory, regret, the appalling mental suffering experienced by WW1 survivors and the brittle nature of British society in the 1920s. In another two part episode, Rupert and Charlie look at this seminal work of twentieth century English fiction.