Final Verdict and Future Episodes

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The doors would be taken off their hinges, Rumpelmare's men were coming, and then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning, fresh as if issued to children on a beach, what a lark, what a plunge for so it had always seemed to her, when with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, st iller than this, of course, the air was in the early morning, like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave, chill and sharp, and yet, for a girl of eighteen, as she then was, solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen, looking at the flowers, at the trees, with the smoke winding off them, and the rooks rising, falling, standing and looking until Peter Walsh said Musing among the vegetables. Was that it? I prefer men to cauliflowers. Was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out onto the terrace. Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days. June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull. It was his sayings one remembered, his eyes, his pocket knife, his smile, his grumpiness, and when millions of things had utterly vanished , how strange it was. A few sayings like this about cabbages . So that was the opening of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf, which was published by her own press, the Hogarth Press, on the fourteenth of may nineteen twenty five. And it's a short book set on a single day in London in June 1923, and it follows a day in the life of the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway. And she is the wife of a Conservative MP. And that evening she is giving a party. And so with that opening, we're instantly thrown into her head, so it's a stream of consciousness with no obvious narrator between Clarissa and us, and there's even the possibility that it's not her head, it it could be her maid, Lucy . And then as the day passes , the gongs of Big Ben mark the hours and they often signal a transition from one character's head to another. So, for example, her old friend Peter Walsh from that opening reading, her kind of former would-be suitor, former love. Um, he comes back and we spend time with him in his head and kind of his view of Clarissa and of London. And the stories of these kind of high society people are interwoven with other people that they encounter in London. Above all, um a young World War I veteran called Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia. And Septimus is suffering from shell shock and he's struggling with these strange hallucinations and these voices in his head. And then near the end of the book, he is driven to make a terrible, tragic decision , which we will be discussing after the break. So why is Mrs. Dalloway so important? Why why does it matter so much to so many people? Tappy, hi everybody. Um I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of three books published in the nineteen twenties, so James Joyce's Ulysses and a book that we've already done on the show, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, that stand as sort of canonical masterpieces of the age. So like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway is written in this stream of consciousness style, which you already described. So we feel like we're in Mrs. Dalloway's head, and we will talk about exactly how she, Virginia Woolf, achieves that. And like the Great Gatsby , it's a very short book. So if you're daunted by it, if you've not read it and you're daunted by it, you know, don't be, because you can read it pretty quickly. It's packed with meaning, it's very subtle and it's ambiguous, and you sometimes has to have to puzzle out exactly what's going on, but that's part of the fun of it. And Virginia Wolfe, when she wrote it, she definitely thought she was doing something new with it. So she had written a um a celebrated and controversial essay a year earlier, before she published this book, so in 1924. We'll we'll talk about this essay maybe later on, in which she basically said the old way of writing novels, where you've got a narrator who tells you what's going on and he describes the outward appearance of things and all of this. That's got to go. That's not that's not capable of capturing the world as it now is. She says in December nineteen ten, human character changed. So sometime around the beginning of the first world war , there was a radical change in the way that human beings thought of themselves and their lives, and that needed a new style. And so Mrs. Dalloway, you have a style of writing a book that is reflecting what she sees as this new world of psychoanalysis, the subconscious, technology, crowds, and the combination of those things and the new style of um writing about it is something that's often defin ed by academics using a word that actually our executive producer, Tony Pastor, said we were banned from using. I know. We swore when we started doing this show that we would never use this word. We would never use this word. This word is modern ism. And Tony always says, You mentioned modernism, all your listeners leave. So this is the test, basically. So let's before we get into Mrs. Dalloway, why it's such an important book and such a to my mind, I'm gonna put my cards on the table, a brilliant book. Tabby, people often find this quite an unsettling book when they first read it. They can't get on with it. What was your take on it? I actually really liked it. I just loved the writing. I thought it was so beautiful. I think maybe I slightly missed the point. We'll talk about um Jane Austen later and and how this slightly plays in into Jane Austen. But I loved like the the elegance of the world. Yeah, the twenties world. Yeah, exactly. Um this time, rereading it, I I loved it. I was so moved by it. Um it's so perfectly balanced and full of feeling, and it evokes like genuine melancholy when you read it. And this recognizable feeling of longing for a past that you never experienced and you didn't know, but you can pin it onto your own life in some way. And she's so good at conjuring kind of sensation, you can see, smell, almost taste everything that these characters are experiencing. She really allows you into their hearts and their minds. I agree completely. What about you? Because I know obviously working with you on the rest is history. Mm-hmm. Um you famously uh are not a big fan of Virginia Wolf. Famously. Yeah. Uh people talk of nothing else. Yeah, it's true. Um the great talking point of the twenty first century. So uh if there are people who listen to this who also listen to the rest of history, they may be surprised to hear that this is one of very few books that I've read more than twice. You know, full disclosure, I'm not a massive admirer of Virginia Wolfe personally, we'll probably come onto this , but I think this is one of the most perfect novels in the English language. I I absolutely love it. I think it is a an incredibly moving book. Every time I've read it, I've found different things in it. I think it's not just a brilliant experiment in how to write a novel and actually what a novel is, but I think it's a it really gets to the core of being human in some ways. So it's about memory and it's about regret. It's about time passing, a feeling of sadness at all you've lost, the loss of your youth, the loss of like past loves and stuff like that, the disappointments of life. I think especially the older you get, you read into it, you know, you find your own experience reflected in it and you see different things, you react to the characters in different ways. It's also very much a book of its time. It it kind of buys into a lot of the concerns of this period. So let's talk about the historical context a bit. What's the historical context for Mrs. Dalloway? So Virginia Wolf writes this book in the early 1920s. So roughly let's say between 1922 and 1924, and that is a really fascinating period in British history . So the first world war is over, but Britain feels like a very weary, anxious, shell-shocked country. Um, the prime minister appears in this book, but it's a period of of political chaos. So between when she started writing it and when it was published, Britain had five different prime ministers. Extraordinary. So David Lloyd George, Bonner Law, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsey MacDonald, and Stanley Baldwin again. And the novel is set in the middle bit of that, which is Stanley Baldwin very brief premiership, his first premiership. You love Stanley Baldwin. Stanley Baldwin, who is the greatest of all Englishmen. There it is. He is described at the he at the party's not named, but he's described as looking so order really ordinary. And this is a foolish from Virginia Wolf because actually this was well, Baldwin did look very ordinary, but this was his superpower. This was he why he won so many elections. Anyway, it's also a period of great social change. So women can now vote. They've been able to vote since 1918. It's the age of flappers, new fashions and whatnot. As we described in the Great Gatsby when we're talking about America, it's an age of cultural change. So the cinema , motor cars, it's the age of jazz, it's the age of nightclubs and cocktail parties and all of these kinds of things. The fashions have changed as well. I love that part of it. Yes, and the sense of change, the characters in the book are consciously living through an age of change. So they are discussing the state of the British Empire, which is now at its territorial peak but is slightly ricket y. And also Peter Walsh, the character we've already mentioned, he comes home from India and he says at one point, those five years, nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty three, had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different, newspapers seemed different. There is a sense of great flux and uncertainty in the twenties that I think this book captures perfectly. Yeah, and Virginia Woolf that she wrote, you can see how much this was on her mind. She wrote, We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves. The war sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance, but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scuttled up to the very end. So she is obviously extremely conscious that this is a new world and that's reflected in what she's trying to achieve in Mrs. Dalloway with her very you know innovative writing style. Exactly. So in literature, this is an age of great transition. So up to this point, there had been this kind of um generation of male male novelists. So absolutely Titanic figures like Joseph Conrad or Thomas Hardy. The Edwardians. The Edwardians. That title alone perfectly kind of summons up what they what they were, certainly to people like Virginia Wolf. But it's not that different in time , right? It's only a it's only a the day before yesterday. Yeah. And we'll get on to this. There is a particular kind of novelist, so H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Gaulsworthy. They are writing books that are very, very popular with readers in the 1900s and 1910s, but that she thinks are old hat and dull and unadventurous, I suppose. And she and her friends are trying to do something different. I mean she's got a great friend, T. S. Elliot. Yeah. The poet. He had published the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock in nineteen fifteen, which is actually about a party, and then The Wasteland, um, in December nineteen twenty two, I believe, your favourite poem, Tebby. I actually love um the love song of Jail for Poof Rock as well. But yeah, the Wasteland is my favourite poem. I agree with you, by the way. Amazing poems. And then James Joyce, with whom she had, shall we say, a quite slightly complicated Yeah, a complicated relationship. He had published a portrait of the artist as a young man in nineteen sixteen and then Ulysses in February nineteen twenty two and she had read certainly bits of Ulysses as she was getting into Mrs. Dalloway, and there is clearly a sense in which you know she is part of something greater, and she's taking inspiration from these writers as she produces her own book. So who was Virginia Woolf? A lot of our listeners, I am guessing, will have very strong views about Virginia Woolf, whether pro or anti . She is one of the literary celebrities, isn't she, Tabby, of the 20th century? She is. And when we were speaking about Wuthering Heights, we kind of spoke about how Emily Bronte is often used as kind of a hero for all sorts of, you know, different groups in society. Virginia Woolf plays a similar role. You know, she's a heroine to feminists, very liter ary types, very artsy people, people suffering from mental health, particularly members of the LGBTQ community. She I don't know, was she brought into the public consciousness again by this movie, The Hours, where Nicole Kidman played her. I love that movie, but then obviously, far more importantly, I played her. Um, in my in my GCSE monologue, uh, I pretended to be Virginia Wolf, and beforehand, I had to get in the shower. I was sopping wet. And then I came onto the stage and we'll explain why that is. Oh my gosh. A bit later on. Yeah. You had you had been in the river ooze. I'd been in the river ooze, yeah. Emotionally and physically. Did you write the monolog ue? I don't think I did. I think I took it from someone else's play and shamefully I can't remember, but let me tell you, it was damn good. This would be tremendous bonus content for listeners. Those examiners walked out changed. They they saw something a a fresh young talent. Something they'll never have to do. And so somehow I ended up here. We just had the Oscars and I'm here doing tragedy. But as you you know, as you have already displayed, she's very much Marmine. Some people love her, some people hate her. I've always loved her personally. Right. But I can see that a bit like Emily Bronte, she sometimes is used in a way that slightly insists up on itself for people. I think that's true. I think there's a particular uh kind of male critic, probably in which I slightly include myself, who bridles Virginia Wolf. So my great hero, John, the critic John Carey, wrote a book called The Intellectuals and the Masses, which he basically took a m you know a massive sort of sledgehammer to the reputation of the Bloomsbury Group and people like that. And Virginia Woolf is really the arch one of the arch villains of this book. Yeah. You know, it's sort of snob and all of this kind of thing, you know, sneering at ordinary people, blah blah blah de blah. We'll unpack some of that because it obviously the reality is a little bit more nuanced. So um tell us about uh Virginia Wolf growing up and all that stuff. So she's born Virginia Stephen in London in eighteen eighty-two, and she's the daughter of uh a literary editor called Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. And they're very much that sort of family, you know, they're high-minded, they're a very high-minded literary family. Historically, they've been evangelical Christians, and they definitely maintain that strain of kind of bing do-gooders. And they produce generations of writers and lawyers and educators and that kind of thing. So you can see what kind of a family they are. And they divide their time between London and St Ives in Cornwall, which Virginia loved. And they rent a house every summer looking across to God Revy Lighthouse. And so she writes that into the lighthouse, her other very famous novel. And the sea is always a big part, and actually, water is always a big part of Virginia Woolf's writing. Um, and then a very telling remark in the Oxford Diction ary of National Biography, Thrilling Read, says that it was decided at an early age that Virginia was to be a writer. So again, you know, this is the sort of family that shovels out writers and she's no exception. But she did actually like writing from a very young age. Like it's not it's not as if this was forced on her. She loved writing. She says uh later in her diary that writing absorbed her, that ever since I was a little creature scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St Ives while the grown-ups dined. I think that's a charming image actually. You know, I think I did that, like a little diary and you're kind of you think it's very important. Everything you're saying is terribly important while kind of the adults look on. And, you know, unsurprisingly, therefore, she was bookish, she was educated at home, she devours everything in her father's library, and she kind of has daily chats with her father about kind of all things liter ary. Um, so she is remarkably almost entirely self-educated, which kind of makes her later comments, shall we say, about James Joyce a little bit ironic. Yeah, you're not wrong. But something there is a dark ness, isn't there? So basically that that the darkness grows and grows um from her the time point when she's what? About six, and there is a very, very dark side to her life. There's a series of just tragedies that basically unravel her whole life. So the chief um so obviously she loved St. Ives and art and books, but all the while she was being sexually abused by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth. And this, as you say, probably began when she was as young as six. Um, and then, you know, her mother then died. So it's a little again, this is very Emily Bronte. Her mother then died when she was thirteen, and she's shattered by this. Uh in the 1940s, she described herself at that time as being a newborn creature creature hammered again and again as she sat with her wings still creased on the broken chrysalis . And that's when she suffers her first mental breakdown. More physical abuse from Gerald Duckworth follows. You know, he horrible stuff. He creeps in this is really nasty. He creeps into her bed at night, but she can't tell anybody. And then in 1897, when she's only 15, that's the first time that she starts writing in her journal about suicide. And this is something that will kind of continue for the rest of her life. And she writes, This diary is lengthening indeed, but death would be shorter and less painful. Yeah. And then her father dies in nineteen oh four, doesn't he? Which is uh massive. She'd been close to her father, she'd kind of idolized him to some extent. Uh you know, he'd been her tutor and this is another massive blow, another breakdown. That's her stability gone. Yeah, and she does try to kill herself this time, doesn't she? She throws herself out of the window, I think. Yeah, she does. And so from this point onwards, her mental state is always fragile, isn't it? There's always the sort of the voices of the past. I mean liter,ally sometimes she will be hearing voices and things. And you know, the sort of her relationship to the kind of mental health, she's she's a a writer who incorporates it into her books. I mean, it becomes a great wellspr ing for her, but at the same time it makes her life a complete misery. Hm. I mean this is a huge part of um Mrs. Dalloway. She channels the all of that into her into the character, um, Septimus Warren Smith, as we will see. Yeah. And yeah, as you say, she's she's she's deeply traumatised by all these things that happen to her as a child and she never really um kind of recovers any sort of stability. So, you know, as we've said, she was clearly very mentally tormented, but why else was she so mentally tormented, would you say? It's partly because she feels she's too clever, too different to fit in. I mean part of it I think is because she feels that as a woman, she doesn't have a place. And that's really important to her. She says, you know, that society is this kind of comp competent, complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against his fangs, no other desires to paint or to write could be taken seriously. And actually later on, she when she writes her essay A Room of One's Own about women's writing, she says basically if Shakespeare had had a sister who was just as talented as Shakespeare, she would have been pulled apart, she would have ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. This idea that basically for a a a clever, independent woman, you know, society as it is now has no place for you and will tear you apart. So that's part of it. People who've written biographies of her have said, you know, maybe she suffered from manic depression. Um, maybe it's partly genetic. Her mother was very melanchol ic, her father was very depressive. But the sort of the sort of the irony of this, the tragic irony, is that the the mental instability and the and the the mental health issues that she has undoubtedly inspire the works and contribute to the greatness of the works because the idea of the fragmented self, the idea of the sort of slippery or porous boundary between sanity and insanity, all those things, they come as much from her own experience as they do from the kind of wider culture or anything like that. Yeah, and it's and it's a as you say, a massive part of her genius. But the other interesting thing is her family kind of plays up to this kind of caricature of her as this sort of mad, scatty, helpless genius who's kind of very dependent on her sister, Vanessa. By the mid-1900s, she's moved to Bloomsbury with her siblings, so Vanessa, Vanessa Bell later, and Toby and Adrian. Yeah. She does a little bit of teaching and writing, but above all, and probably most famously, she kind of falls in with her brother Toby's mates from Cambrid ge. So these are all quite famous, recognizable names. So there's Lytton Strachey. Yep. There's the art critic Clive Bell. Um then there's the artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, and of course the novelist Ian Forster, so that's famously, you know, Passage to India, Room with the View. And the economist John Maynard Keynes. We refer to them now as the Bloomsbury Group. So they are very posh. They're very clever, they're very anti like convention, they're liberal, progressive, they have very kind of high-minded views, quite progressive views on things like feminism. They're pacifists, and they're they're they're they're a little bit self-im portant maybe, a little bit self-importantly like into the arts, you know, they're do-gooders, and yet, alongside all this, they get out to kind of outrageous, very cancellable, chinny japes on the side. So the dreadnought hoax in nineteen ten, so they do a bit of a Justin Trudeau tabby. They um apply boot polish to their faces and then they blag their way onto this uh boat, which was this sort of the absolute pride and joy of the Royal Navy, pretending to be Abyssinian visitors. And this was um a great fur ry in the press. They, whenever people asked them questions, they just muttered bunger bunga under their breaths, which people thought was Abyssinian. And that's the origin of Sylvia Bolascona's bunga bunga sex parties. That's where the phrase bunga bunga comes from. But anyway, she marries one of these uh Bloomsbury group people, uh Leonard Wolfe, who's a civil servant and goes on to become an author and publisher, and actually goes on to become a would-be failed kind of Labour MP . And this is a very odd relation. Well, it's quite an odd relationship. I mean it's not unheard of, her relationship with Leonard. No, so certainly not for this time as well. Leonard Wolfe's Jewish and she often describe I mean she describes him in pretty scathing terms. She says he's a pennil a penniless Jew, she calls him. And she says to him, basically, I'm not attracted to you in the slightest. Ha and and actually they get married anyway . He gives her a bit of grief about her what he sees as her sexual frigidity. Yeah. But they were still a loving and very devoted couple. You know, them the marriage worked as it were. I think there was a lot of love between them and he took very, very good care of her. You know, he was incredibly kind and patient with her during her bouts of mental illness. So I think there's something quite sweet between them. But the other thing Tabby is her sexuality, isn't it She definitely did have affairs with women. So I mean I mean most famously Vita Sackville West, who was a garden designer, and they their affair lost between 1925 and 1935, so a long time. But there were other women as well, other society characters, for instance, Sybil Colfax, Lady Ottline Morrell, and Mrs. Dalloway's I mean we'll get onto this more later, but Mrs. Dalloway's recollections of her friend, her girlhood friend Sally Seaton, I mean, they're full of kind of, you know, lesbian ardour. So I I think I think I think she yeah, she probably was So you can understand why a lot of people see Virginia Wolfe as a heroine, can't you? As a as a a role model almost. Yeah. Um but there is of course another side to her, and this is what we mentioned before that often male critics and particularly male critics who are not themselves posh and Bloomsbury Group type people will bring out so critics like John Carey. And critics of that kind will often paint her as just this most towering, insufferable snob. Yeah. And you can see why . Because if you go through her journal entries, I mean some of the stuff is pretty grim. The fact is the lower classes are detestable. Imbeciles should certainly be killed. She describes delegates at a peace conference as sad, green dressed negroes and negresses looking like chimpanzees. I mean that is pretty shocking. When she goes out on Kensington High Street, she says it's uh full of women of incredible mediocrity, as drab as dishwater. When she goes shopping, I bought my fish and meat in the high street, a degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously . There's a lot of anti Semitism, which is mad from somebody married to um a Jewish guy. How I hated marrying a Jew, how I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewelry and their noses and their wattles. And but then she goes on to say there's self-knowledge there, because she goes on to say, what a snob I was, for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all . But then the other thing that the thing that actually I find so d dislikable about her is her snobbish contempt for writer, other writers from more humble back grounds. So we already mentioned this essay that she wrote before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway. And this was putting the boot into a writer that I love who was a guy called Arnold Bennett. Not terribly fashionable now to be honest. He was born in Stoke on Trent. He wrote these very realist books, sort of slightly old-fashioned books, about ordinary people in the potteries in Stoke-on-Trents and thereabouts. The best one I think is The Old Wives Tale, which is a brilliant, brilliant book about two sisters, and it gives these ordinary people's lives tremendous gives them this kind of romance and dignity and all of that and meaning and stuff. And he was the highest paid writer in Edwardian Britain. He was a a writer , you know, by today's standards he would be a a multi multimillionaire. He was rich enough on the back of these high quality literary books. I mean he did also do some kind of hack work as well, but to have a yacht in the south of France, to have all this kind of thing. Anyway, Virginia Wolfe wrote this essay about him in 1924, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, and she says basically people at Arnold Bennett are rubbish. They're old hats, they're only interested in the surface. I'm interested in people's inner lives. But these people like him and H. G. Wells and whatnot, all they care about is the surface stuff. They don't see into people's consciousness. And and there's a slight sense, I think, for some critics that basically she would look at writers who were self-made, who came from outsider provincial backgrounds, and she just massively looked down on them and put the boot in um and sort of sneered at them and acted as though their books were just superficial and shallow, which they're definitely not. I think they're I think she was grossly unfair to them. And so some critics, like me, I guess, kind of take their side and dislike this because basically she won. She she defined their reputations forever because she's the kind of person that loads of kind of academics like and they're not. And so, you know, you feel like you want to champion the underdog against the posh woman, basically. I mean I get that. I think she is harsh on kind of those writers like that, you know, saying that she that that she managed I mean, to find something that they'd always lacked. But I do think I do think Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is like I think don't it's about where Arnold Bennett comes from or anything. It's it's just about the writing. It's a critique of like what she considered to be an outdated literary convention. It's about what she is trying to capture, you know, the new shifts in society since nineteen Well she's invented the criteria. I mean she's basically said, Oh, everything's different since nineteen ten, therefore if you're writing in the old style you're rubbish. I mean, I think that's I mean that's another that's just becomes circular. She's just basically saying if you don't like write like me, then you're no good. And I th I don't think that's right. No, I don't think that's right either either. I love a lot of those books, but I think she she is right in that she is trying to write women in a new and kind of innovative way. That's that's that's definitely true. And what what what's going on within them. And that's something I agree with and that is admirable. And she does find, she does capture something about this period and about, you know, what's going on in people's minds. She's very successful at what she does. You can't say that she kind of throws in the boot at them and then fails at what she sets out to do. That would be reprehensible, but she does succeed. I totally agree, Tabby. But the fact remains that she's also very snobbish towards another experimental modernist writer, and this is James Joyce. So James Joyce is obviously a massive influence on her. She's reading Ulysses, isn't she, when she's writing Mrs. Dalloway? Yeah. And when she reads it, she writes, she says I was puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned, as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. She describes Ulysses as an illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me, the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. I mean to write that about like a a writer a a writer like Joyce, but B um a self-taught working man, that's hard to justify, I would say. It definitely is, and also because that she takes so much from Joyce, like she really does. This kind of day in a life format, like Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, that's very kind of Mrs. Dalloway. So yeah, I think that that's that is poor from her. And you can't in on on the one hand try to say that you're trying to do something really innovative and, you know, you're trying to capture a new way of writing that reflects, you know, the condition of people's minds and the times and then come down really hard on someone else that's doing something similar. So I agree with that. But then how do we get from where we were with Virginia Woolf to Mrs. Dalloway? So after the mid-1910s, her mental health uh improves a bit, and she and Leonard they live in Hogarth House in Richmond, and that's where they set up the Hogarth Press. And it's they hand print these gorgeous books. And they publish the likes of T. S. Elliott, Catherine Mansfield, Ian Forster, John Maynard, Keynes, etc. But she's writing mainly kind of short stories about literary criticism, essays, about the novel, this kind of thing. She's rejecting Victorian realism, as we've said, and she's trying to find a way to express consciousness on the page in a brand new way, you know, trying to inject character with something that's changeable, constantly shifting rather than one-dimensional, and using the idea of kind of buried, repressed memories to shape the present. And this is you can see this most clearly in Jacob's room, which she published in 1922. There's that there's practically no plot in that at all. It's kind of a series of impressions from the mind of the central character. But she still has really bad mental health, terrible headaches, fevers. Her diary entry from August nineteen twenty one says for sixty days and those days what a gap for sixty days and those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, etcetera etcetera sedatives, plunging back into bed again. So you can see she's very, very unwell. And she calls these resurgence of um depression. She calls it a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of truth. But the way she gets out of it is partly by working, isn't it? So she says, you know, the only way I keep afloat is by working. Now she's already created these two characters, Mr and Mrs. Dalloway., They they were she did a book called The Voyage Out in 1915, and they were kind of walk-on characters. So Mrs. Dalloway is just a sort of posh, brainless society woman, and Mr. Dalloway is just a generic Tory MP in this in this early version, but she begins to think that she can do something more with them. She does a short story called Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, which is about Mrs. Dalloway going off to buy some gloves, isn't it? Um and then she's got the idea for a second story about the Prime Minister uh who's driving through London going to misses Delaware's party, and she basically ha gets the idea that she can take these two stories, put them together, and turn them into a bigger novel and she'll call the novel maybe at home or just the party. If you want to dig into the story behind Mrs. Dalloway, by the way, there's a book that I was reading, Mrs. Dalloway's biography of a novel by Mark Hussey, which I greatly recommend. Anyway, that's by the by . Then in August nineteen twenty three, she says I,'ve had my big discovery. Um how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters. I think that gives them exactly what I want humanity, humour, and depth. So this idea that behind each character , each character kind of contains worlds, I suppose, Tabby, you know, memories and all sorts. Yeah, exactly. Because she was kind of struggling to, you know, create this very complex sort of painting or whatever it may be of multiple points of views but without making the characters just kind of one dimensional and I love that expression. I think she totally succeeds at that. But the working title at this stage is The Hours, so that's why the movie is called The Hours. And that's really, I think, pertinent because the book is so much about the passage of time and above all, kind of the approach of death. And critics have pointed out how cubist it is. You know, I mentioned a painting. So as in Cubus painting, so the chime of Big Ben, the clock, is like a grid, and this is provides the structure for the book and order. And then kind of beneath this is this a kind of a apparent random flow of impressions. And then there's also the way that Cubus paintings attempt to create an object from different points of view simultaneously and then combine these multiple viewpoints into a sort of collage. And that is exactly what she's doing in Mrs. Dalloway. And you can see that this is something that she's working out and playing with and experimenting with for ages. Because it takes her a long time to write. And right till the very end, till the final chapters, she's kind of experimenting with it. Anyway, she finally finishes Mrs. Dallowa y in late autumn 1924 and publishes it with her own Hogarth Press in May 1925. And then there's a limited print run of just 2,000 copies. But how was Mrs. Dalloway received? Because obviously at this time it's very unusual in its kind of style and form. Yeah, I think a lot of reviews just said it's um they couldn't really get a handle on it. They said there's no obvious who's the main character, you know, what's the point? There's no story, nothing happens, it's just a day in the life, effectively. It builds up to this party and then it just stops. And they sort of said, Um I don't really get it. So even somebody like D. H. Lawrence, he said, I when I read it, I felt like I was being shaken up in a feather mattress until I felt like a feather myself. And which is I think it's lovely expression. I don't actually know what that means. Uh I I like it. It's sort of meaningless but it's powerful. Yeah, but it's very Mrs. Dalloway. It is very Mrs. Dalloway. What's one of the succession of books that makes her a star to people who are very interested in literature and letters, but it's obviously not a book that hasn't a tremendous appeal to the general public because most people want a story. I'm so struck every week by how few of the books that we do, kind of older books, are well received in their own time. Yeah, but I th I think 'cause we often in this show we've done a lot of books that are trailblazing in one way or other. Yeah, yeah. So actually even the Woman in White, you know, which now I mean it's a book that Virginia Wolf would probably have looked down on as very old hat , but at the time, you know, was seen as doing something radical and new and dramatic. I think it's just that people don't like innovation by and large. And people are quite even critics are often quite small c conservative, I think. Anyway, we should just say a little bit about what happens to Virginia Woolf, because she writes a series of other books, doesn't she? To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, The Years, and so on and so forth. She does A Room of One's Own, which is an essay about women's writing. But actually she never she never vanquishes her demons, as it were, and by the beginning of the Second World War they have returned to claim her, haven't they? Yeah, very much so. Because by by early 1941, she was back in depression, as you said, and then her home in London was destroyed in the Blitz. And she's very disappointed by the kind of lukewarm reaction to her biography of her friend Roger Fry. And then, as you say, this is when she starts hearing voices again and she fears that she's going mad. So then, uh, on the twenty eighth of March nineteen forty one, she writes a farewell note to her husband Leonard. She writes Dearest, I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another one of these terrible times, and I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate, so I'm doing what seems the best thing to do. And then it goes on. So then she walks into the river ooze, way down with stones in her pockets, and she drowned herself, and her body wasn't found for days . And then following her death, her reputation kind of declined till the 1960s, and then suddenly it revived, and Lynd Gallord on sees three things as crucial to this revival. First is her passim pacifism, her kind of leftiness, general avant-garde leftiness. And that's very popular with students. She's also seen as a forerunner of feminism and as a mental health martyr. Yeah. I mean I know exactly what you mean. She basically becomes um a bit like Sylvia Plath maybe. Yes, like Sylvia Plath, exactly. s Thortere's of um I don't want to denigrate this at all. No, I don't I don't either. I don't want to sound like I'm sneering at it. I can understand I I do totally understand why she means so much to people, you know, it's always kind of encouraging and and re refreshing to see your own troubles, you know, carried by someone else who who made something great of themselves and, you know, managed in spite of it. Exactly. Yeah. So it's understandable. And in the age of university expansion, uh there are more there are more students, but also university courses love Virginia Woolf. She's very, very popular with academics. I mean, the one thing I'd say about that, Lindell Gordon, her excellent biography, says of Virginia Woolf that if you narrow her down to just a sort of um somebody who is a victim, you know, suffering from sexism or suffering with her mental health um agonies, then you miss what is most important about her, which for her biographers is the work and is her status as a great as somebody who actually, you know, channels the the traumas of her life and exploits it, mines the traumas for great art and actually overcomes them through into to some extent by her literary craftsmanship. And so that brings us back to Wolf the writer and to this book in particular, which I think is her masterpiece. And so we'll come to Mrs. Dalloway itself after the break. This episode is brought to you by Expedia and Visit Scotland. Start your story in Scotland. Experience the pool of wide, untamed landscapes and fresh cuisine that feels rooted in place. Discover castles steeped in legend. And feel the genuine warmth from locals you meet in a place that will stay with you long after you leave. Start planning your own Scottish holiday. Today at expedia.co.uk slash visit scotland . Head to the coast in Abercrombie's latest summer draw. It's dress season. From minis to maxis, there's a dress for every summer plan. And Abercrombie's new linen blend matching sets are so light and breathable. Perfect for brunch or rooftop happy hours. Dress like you're on holiday. Shop Abercrombie in the app, online, and in stores . Right, home from work. Walk the dog. Kids are back. Mom! Up the stairs for something . Ugh. Back down. No idea what I went up for. Mom, what's the dinner? Chop, sizzle, done. HelloFresh can't slow life down, but it makes bringing everyone together round the table a whole lot easier. So it's phones down, forks up, hello Hello fresh. Bring back dinner time . Hello . Welcome back to the book club, everybody. We're talking about Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf. We've talked about Mrs. Wolfe. Let's talk about Mrs. Dalloway. So Tabby, the st let's start with when you first read the book, what strikes you I think is about the style? And and what is it that you think is so innovative about the style? As we've said, there's almost no plot at all. And there's no fixed narrative voice. There's no omniscient narrator outside of kind of the character's internal thoughts. And I right from the offset, that very, very famous first line, you know, Mrs. Ballow Dalloway said she'd buy the flags herself. Even then you don't realize that you could be in the head of maybe her maid, Lucy, or herself. She's brilliant actually at guiding you without you realising it in these little tributaries into other people's minds and she'll use external objects to do that. So I don't know, like we'll talk later about the way that she uses the put the path of this plane. But you it carries you from one character's mind into another. And then this lack of kind of linear plot, it still drives the narrative along and there's this kind of series of of vignettes and and moments and these characters moving around their day, almost crossing paths, but you know not quite until the very end. And it's this switching between interiors without like totally effortlessly and making each interior so particular to that person that I think is so innovative. Yes. So it's a particular style um which academics call free indirect discourse. So in other words, it's not like first person. It's not uh it's not I did this, I did that. It's Mrs. Dalloway did this, Mrs. Dalloway did that. It's also not quite stream of consciousness either. I think people always think that about Mrs. Dalloway. The first thing that pops into people's heads they're like a stream of consciousness. But it's actually not really because it's not one character, it's many. So it's third person narration. She did this, she did that. But you're sort of in her head the whole time. And this was a style that had been pioneered by French writers like Flaubert or Proust. James Joyce does it in Ulysses. But this is more accessible than Ulysses, I think. So it's always posted, you know, she thought this, she said that. We know we but there's never any doubt really about whose head that we're in. And she does this very carefully. It seems to be random, but it's moving , you know, in a very structured and disciplined way from one character to another. As you say, she uses external things like a car, for example, going down the street. One character is is watching the car, and we're in her head. And then almost without us noticing, you know, another character is watching the car, and then suddenly we're in this other character's head, and then we move with that other character for the next few pages. So that way of moving, I mean that actually that that's a nice example of of the modernity of the book. Because the the idea of the car through the streets, I mean, one of the things she's very good at in Mrs. Dalloway, and you get this almost straight away, is the sense of the dizziness and the bustle and the sort of chaos of the modern city. So lots of different things kind of jumbling up and jostling with each other at once. So the critic Valentine Cunningham describes I I think perfectly how she captures quote the dense turmoil of central London shops, streets, parks, things, things, things, frocks, gloves, hats, macintoshes, umbrellas, bread knives, b odies, planes, cars, vans, this sort of cacophony of stuff that marks it out as a nineteen twenties book, because of obviously things like the plane and the car,, um in a way that you wouldn't have had in a book written in let's say the eighteen eighties or the eighteen nineties or something. No, definitely not. And you love the the speaking of the aeroplane, you love that, don't you, the way that she uses that. So th the th the line from the book is the sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was, coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something, making making letters in the sky. So I mean, A, the the the kind of exclamation marks there, you get a sense that this is extraordinary. This is a new thing. So as you say, if it roots you firm in the nineteen twenties. It also carries you into people's different minds, the smoke almost, the way that they react to it. Yeah, exactly. And I think the the thing about the plane, I love the plane as a device. So the plane is um writing these letters in the sky. Now that's something that had been invented in August 1922, Skyritwing , it was called. And it was and it was used for Are you surprised at that? I'm surprised you knew the exact date, but I'm gratified. I I read it in a book. No. So um it was used for advertising. So the Daily Mail actually were pioneers of this they sent up a plane day after day. Dominic Sandbrook's headlines dominating the sky. Exactly. Corbin's Maoist Britain blazoned across the sky. Well it's your best. There were so many good headlines. Nah. Yeah, as you know. No, I do. As you know, and you're ashamed of it. And so you're just massive projection from you. Anyway, the plane is up in the sky, the plane is writing something, but we never find out what the slogan is . It might be something to do with Toffee or something like that. And there's a sort of ambiguity to it. And I love that because it creates a sense of uncertainty. And I think that that ambiguity and uncertainty is one of the I mean you've said that about the style. There's no narrator who's telling you what everything is and where it all fits. You have to kind of puzzle that out for yourself. Yeah, and you know, it's also this is it's incredibly cinematic. And the cinema obviously in the 1920s was kind of on the rise, has becoming a big thing. And you can see why. So she first imagined Mrs. Dalloway as kind of just being a series of vignettes. She was fascinated by the idea of kind of images, like connected images side by side, and how that would work. And that's almost like a series of shots on a storyboard or something. And she actually wrote an essay about cinema in 1926. She was she was really interested in it. And her writing is full of kind of cinematic techniques. It's really interesting. There are there are flashbacks. She does tracking shots almost, quick cuts between scenes and characters. The motor car you mentioned is a classic case of that. We follow it, say, with one camera maybe going up Bond Street at the start. This one external visual object this allows you to pan from one mind to another, as we said of the planes, and as people kind of project their own fantasies onto it. And then the other big um kind of structural force in the novel, as we said in the first half, is time, hence that title, the the working title, the hours. So time structures the title the novel time structures the novel in the present, though much of the book is spent kind of thinking about the past, and the this is literally manifested by the chime of Big Ben . So Big Ben was first heard on the radio on New Year's Eve in 1923, and then from February 1924, it was heard every hour on BBC Radio. And Big Ben kind of represents the official, irrevocable of passing time. Like it's it's much more masculine, it signifies state and kind of patriarchy. But then there's the times of another smaller clock, and this is the clock of St. Margaret's. And this is described as a late clock that came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends. I love that. And so this is the kind of smaller, more personal, more emotional clock, and it kind of signifies a more feminine, more domestic, more i you know, internalized experience of the passing of time. So that's almost Mrs. Dalloway's clock. And you had that you were talking in the first half about Cubism and about Cubist art and the fact that Cubist art, when you first look at it, it appears to be sort of slightly random and confusing, but there's a kind of grid underneath that structures it. And the the passing of time, the hours is the grid, the uh the underpinnings of the book, I suppose. And so the bongs of um Big Ben , then often the narrative moves or the narrative voice moves from one character to another and I think that's really, really cleverly done. And it's a sign of how, you know, when you talk about as you said, you know, the book is not just this kind of mad stream of consciousness. It is very carefully ordered and disciplined and structured. Yeah exactly. It definitely is. So let's get to Mrs. Dalloway herself. So Mrs. Dalloway herself, I mean she is a I mean she, is as a character a really good example of Virginia Wolf star because, like so many things in the book, she's not fixed or simple herself. She is quite kaleidoscopic and quite fragmented. And the whole point of that is that what Virginia Woolf thought was that to be, you know, a character is not just a simplistic, simple thing. You know, like as and you'll read a lot of nineteenth century books, and the character can be, you know, you we mentioned the woman in white, right? Which we did a few weeks ago. In the woman in white, the characters can by and large be summed up in a single sentence. You know, you're Walter Hartwright, you're the drawing teacher, you're a good fellow, you're decent, you're quite boring. That's it. End of story. You know, there's no doubt about who this person is or what they stand for or any of this. Yeah. For Clarissa Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is somebody who is she's layers upon layers. She's a made up of memories and experiences , and her identity is kind of always shifting as it as all of us, our identity kind of shifts, and we have different personas and we have different parts that we play, and sometimes we wonder who we are and what fun ction we have in life. And a character like Mrs. Dalloway captures that perfectly. Yeah, and also therefore the way that the reader feels about her, because the way that different characters feel about her is constantly shifting, and that's also true to life. One's opinions of people are all like a constantly changing. Nothing like that is fixed. And a large part of this, I think, is because this is the period that saw the rise of psychoanalysis. Now, Virginia Woolf was overtly very dismissive of psychoanalysis. But she believed, like Freud, that one's adult identity was kind of formed in large part in childhood. And I mean you can see why a woman who experienced what she experienced would believe that had a large part to play in who she became. You can see this very clearly in the flashbacks of Mrs. Dalloway, but psychoanalysis introduced the idea of kind of a multi-layered self, and it also introduced the idea that your subconscious could have as big a part to play in who someone was and how someone behaved as one's conscious thoughts and actions. This is all over Mrs. Dalloway, particularly say in in characters' fantasies about their childhoods. So there's this rather stern, domineering woman called uh Lady Bruton. And then suddenly we kind of get cut thrown into her childhood as she remembers, you know, being a girl and being a tomboy and riding her pony and playing with her brothers. And then you can kind of see how the thread of that can be traced back into the woman that we're meeting in the present, but it humanizes her, gives her more than one dimension. So this is something that actually, you know, uh to go back to our early example about the Wilokkie Collins bo, The Woman in White, I don't know why we're holding that up as the sort of antithesis of the Woman in White. But if you look at that, the characters in that book, we don't really get a sense of them having inner lives and memories and secrets and unresolved tensions going back to their childhood and all that kind of thing. You know, Walter is just Walter. In this, I think one of the wonderful things about it is the character you get this sense that the characters have depths within them that they don't quite understand themselves. It's those caves that she was speaking about, the tunnelling process. Yes, exactly. And I think why why that works really nicely is that Clarissa Dalloway is not necessarily a terribly clever or interesting person. She's very conventional. She's she's she's not very intellectual. She's bored by politics. She loves fair you know, very kind of mate, you know uh, domestic feminine hobbies. She loves flowers, she loves her clothes, you know. Yes. So she's Virginia Wolf is not writing she's not putting herself in I mean, she is putting herself into the book in lots of different ways, but Clarissa Dalloway is not her . No. Clarissa is still a I mean she's a decent person, isn't she? All the characters you know, people think sometimes that she's perhaps uh superficial and silly, but they don't doubt that she's a nice person. Yeah, I I think she's such she's such a subtly wrought character. 'Cause you get like her friend Sally Season says of her at one point, she's very hard on people, she says that she lacks something. The other character, Peter Walsh, is always lambasting her for, as you say being, superficial, for being, you know, obsessed by the society and you know who people are and stuff. So that's how she appears on the one hand, and then they change their minds about her and they say, Oh, but you know, there is something about her. She's such a good friend, she's good hearted. And the thing is, we are inside Mrs. Dalloway's head, so we kind of experience all of her self-doubt. So we all have self-doubt. You know, she wonders at one point, she thinks, um, oh, am I superfici al? You know, have I kind of built my my life around the l wrong things? But then all the while she is feeling and thinking very deeply. She thinks at one point, for instance, which is kind of remarkable. She says cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt. So essentially she's very human. And that line, one must say essentially what one felt. She then contradicts that on multiple occasions throughout. Yes, she does. So one of the examples in which she has different kinds of personalities, split personalities, is that sometimes she's Clarissa and sometimes she's Mrs. Dalloway, and that I think is brilliantly done. Sometimes she is basically, a girl who has happens to have grown up and is full of a girl's thoughts and a girl's longings and yearnings and all of this. And sometimes she is the public facing Mrs. Dalloway who's throwing a party and is defined by, I mean, hence as that name suggests, by her marriage and by her husband. And interestingly, the one person that she doesn't ever really reflect about or think about or remember from you know when she's thinking back to her teenage memories, which plays such a big part. The one person she doesn't really think about is her husband, Richard, who's always slightly out of focus, I think, in this book. He's the Tory MP. And he actually is a little bit less inter esting than the other characters, don't you think? He definitely is. There's almost no chemistry between them. They have kind of this fond but chilly um relationship. There's this one bit when he's leaving a lunch party and he suddenly thinks, you know, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna tell Clarissa I love her, and he just can't. He's too shy almost, even though they've been married all these years. And uh a large part of the book is kind of Clarissa reflecting on him, Richard versus, this, her old suitor, Peter Walsh, and they are foils to one another and reflect you know two sides of life. A little bit like uh Edgar Linton and Heathcliff, maybe, but just massively toned down. Yeah. w Whowich , you know, Richard is, you know, stable, a bit stolid, a bit dull. Yeah. Peter is kind of unstable, wild, passionate. He's always bothering her. On the whole, Mrs. Dalloway is an incredibly sexless character. And the implication I think is slightly that piece of wall should kind of is bothering her, not sexually not in a negative sense, as in, you know, he wants passion from her. Whereas Richard kind of leaves her nicely alone and he's disappointed in the Mrs. Dall oway side of Clarissa. He wants Clarissa. You know, the side of her that she says makes her kind of invisible, unseen, unknown. So she says that being Mrs. Dalloway means that she's not Clarissa anymore. She's just Mrs. Richard Dalloway. On the marriage front, so I mean you said that the sort of as it were the the it's not really a love triangle, that's to massively state it. But in her childhood, in her teenage years, she used to go to this place called Bourton, this country house. And it was at Bourton that she had these incredibly sort of formative teenage experiences with her friend Sally Seaton, who she basically was in love with, and then with these two guys, Richard and Peter. And one critic is Elizabeth Abel says, you know , this stuff that she is remembering is very Jane Austen. We know Virginia Woolf loved Jane Austen. It's about getting married, a choice of suitors, you know, a young woman giddy and sort of dizzy with excitement of falling in love and stuff. And that actually Wolf takes that stuff from Jane Austen and she compresses that into a memory. And the the story of Mrs. Dalloway in some ways is about what happens next. So about what happens when the Jane Austen book is over. Like what happens to the happily married couple? And in this case, what's happened is this very repressed and slightly lonely marriage, where she goes upstairs to her kind of attic room, doesn't she? Um, and she's been ill, and we know that she 's suffers terribly with her health. And Richard says she should be undisturbed at night. And so she reads books about Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Great form. I I admire that. I think that's great. I think that's what everyone should do before they go to bed at night. And her narrow bed, she reads these books. And I think the implication is that there's more there's the something behind this, because I'm already mentioned that she was in love with this character called Sally, her great friend. And we are do you not think, Tabby, we are meant to believe, or we are led to suspect that deep down Clarissa Dalloway is gay, that she her real feelings are for women, no? There's this very famous passage. I think so, yeah. So, I mean, as I said, she's a very sexist character. And then suddenly we get this passage, and it's the one moment of like sort of passion that that we have from Mrs. Dalloway, really, and she says she could not resist sometimes yield yielding to the charm of a woman. She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt, only for a moment, but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge, and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance. Some pressure of rapture which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then for that moment she had seen an illumination, a match burning in a crocus, an inner meaning almost expressed, that match burning in a cro cus is an extraordinary line, it's very, very evocative. And this is, you know, she talks about how the moment that she kissed Sally Seaton when they were young as kind of the most exquisite moment of her life, infinitely precious, she says. And also the writing there, the writing there is so full of kind of feeling and vibrancy and rapture, so much more so than when she kind of reflects on her feelings for Peter or Richard. It's kind of sisterly, it's kind of fond. And Sally is such a kind of passionate, untethered character. She, unlike Clarissa, is not repressed at all and not at all snobbish. And for instance, there's this-you know, there's this bit where they talk about how at 18 she forgot her sponge and ran along the corridor naked. And obviously Clarissa says, you know, that she feels for Sally what men feel. And that passage, this girl running naked down a corridor, I mean that is unprecedented in late nineteenth century, early twentieth century English fiction. I mean, lesbian lesbians are usually depicted as kind of weird, withered spinsters at this time. So, in a way, is it a critique of the social system? Maybe, you know, the fact that she's a more fluid character. And it's also very bold, given that you know later her book um Orlando was almost censored. And then you know at the same time, E.M. Forster was terrified about publishing Maurice for you know kind of homoerotic scenes like this. So and she got away with it. It's really interesting. I agree with you completely. I think that the book comes alive at this moment. It is a justly celebrated passage because it's a passage about female sexuality written in a way that you know people just simply had not done before. You don't find anything like this in you know fantastic women writers like Jane Austen or George Elliott or no or whoever. And actually the Clarissa Sally relationship, this teenage kind of crush, I guess. Maybebe I'm may I'm that sounds a bit dismissive. Let's call it a teenage romance. Yeah. Between these two young uh women. This is the moment when the book emotionally sings when you when you really feel it. And then when Sally actually appears at the book at the end, it makes the crushing disappointment for the reader all the more powerful because actually Sally turns out, we come'll on to this. Sally turns out to be very conventional and very stayed and have to have become unbelievably boring. And this is um well, I mean you haven't had this experience, Tabby, because you're too young, but sometimes one meets people that you that you knew as a teenager and you're like, oh my God, they've turned into the most boring person . I bet you get a massive like surge of Schadenfreude though. Oh happy . I'm so much more interested in them . I mean I'm a wit. Look at this guy. Don't worry Dominic, I get it. I get it. I went to my friend's friend's wedding about ten years ago and I met a bloke who oh my god I hope he doesn't listen to this podcast. He met this guy who had been such a laugh when we were teenagers and I had these really fond memories of him like going out on the lash and stuff like this. And he just wanted to talk to me about paper manufacture. It's just like what went wrong? Oh my god. Um You were just hoping we'd swap some historical anecdote . Anyway. I don't know what's going on with this impression. There's already people on social media saying Tabby is very rude to Dominic. What are they gonna make of this? No, it's just f factionate banter. Um so as we can see from all of that that this is a book, in large part, it's so much so in fact, it's about women and particularly the life cycle of a woman because we there are seven characters basically. So we have Elizabeth, Elizabeth, um, who's Clarissa's daughter, she's 18, Lucrezia, Septimus's wife, she's 20, Miss Kilman in her forties, Clarissa and Sally in their 50s, and then this Lady Bruce, who's in her 60s, and through these seven characters , we can track kind of a woman's life cycle. It's it's a portrait of women at different stages. Again, this relates to the original title, the hours, it's the passage of time . But it's also about so there's that there was actually a a passage in the original draft of Mrs. Dalloway that quite um obviously alluded to menopause and it was cut out because it was thought a little bit crass. So a lot it is also about, you know, the time that Virginia Wolfe was writing this, she was in her forties. She'd been told by doctors that she shouldn't have children. Um and so I think it's a lot of it's about the the kind of melancholy brought on by menopause and particularly for women at this time, defined by their marriages and their role as mothers. Also something you you can't talk about, Tubby, and in the nineteen twenties. You can't even admit that it's happening. No, no. Doctors were very strict about it, um and kind of warned that it would make women mad almost . And so you can see that Mrs. Dalloway's massively internalized all this and she feels kind of empty and a bit her life's a bit futile now. So she actually says at one point, no more marrying, no more having children. And then later she says when she's um rejected from a lunch party, when she's not invited, she says that she feels shrivelled, aged, breastless. And then she this really, really sad kind of meditation. She thinks women must put off their rich apparel at, midday they must disrobe, narrower and narrower would be her bed. Yeah. Growing into kind of grey, crystallized middle age. So Clarissa is haunted throughout by these lines from Shakespeare's play Cymbeline , fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winters rages . And this this line, fear no more the heat of the sun, recurs again and again. And some critics think again this is a reference to kind of female sexuality, that it kind of there's a kind of bloom and then a withering, and that she's at the time of life where she's in the kind of withering stage, and that she's full of regret and and melancholy and depression and whatnot. She's she's had trouble with her health, she's in the narrow bed and she just feels like what's it all been for? What's happened to my life? Yeah, and you really feel that in the kind of joy that of her of her girlhood recollections, you know, the white dresses, the candlelit dinners, you know, laughter on the on the river when they have boat parties. I mean it's so encapsulated, like encapsulates, you know, the frivolity of youth. Well this is the thing that I was saying at the beginning, when you read the book at different stages of your life, you see different things in it. You know, you when you're you read it when you're in your twenties, maybe you you read it in a more I don't know, maybe a less compassionate way than you do when you're in your fifties or something and you're and you're conscious of all the your regret and the the the the narrowing in your own life or whatever. And so you're more responsive to that. Like there's a bit of Clarissa Dalloway in in in everyb ody after a certain point. And so you respond to it differently. Anyway, let's talk about the men a little bit. So there's um we spend a lot of time with Clarissa more than with anybody else. Also with her old flame Peter Walsh, she's come back from Ind ia. He's constantly a kind of intruder. Uh he was an intruder at Bourton. He was kind of interrupting her relationship with her with Sally when they were teenagers, and now he's intruding on her preparations for the party. He's your classic example in some ways of a character whose youthful potential just hasn't worked out, something's gone wrong for him, he's drifted, and he's basically found himself he is in a love triangle because he's fallen in love with this younger woman in India who's young enough to be his daughter, who has two small children, and she married to a major or something like that. And he's Yeah, uh it's always a bit unclear. She's married though and she's much, much younger than him. So it's actually trying to sort out a divorce for her, isn't he? Yeah, but in a very half hearted way, you kind of get the sense that he's sort of a little bit exhausted by it sort of Yes. That he actually won't do it, I think. No, that he actually won't do it and that he's actually kind of trying to recapture his kind of youth, his virility. But the other thing is, which I actually find really moving, is you know, we've spoken about how Clarissa's more moved by her feelings for Sally than anything else. But Peter is genuinely very, very affected by, I think, by Clarissa's rejection of him. You know, he speaks about this terrible scene in the darkness now. He was crying, things like that. He really did ad ore her, but he also he massively idealises this infatuation when they were young. But it it did undoubtedly impact the rest of his life and his dealings with women, I think. Yeah, and he's a slightly odd character in some ways, um a a sort of a weaker man than he appears to be. He's always playing with a knife. Yeah. And it's a sort of it's a sort of anxious fidget. He has this sort of pocket knife that he opens. Is it I mean critics say is this because is this a sort of symbol of his sexuality? Is it a hint of kind of self harm? Um is it nervousness? Is he trying to pretend to be something that he's not or this kind of thing? And there is something a bit off and a bit odd about him, so at one point he just randomly follows a woman through London. It's one of the many scenes through the streets of London in which this book specialises. It's actually a brilliant book about 1920s London. And and Peter follows this woman in in a way that actually you're in his head , so you don't see it this way initially, but it is kind of creepy that he's just following randomly following this young woman and then he changes his mind. And then we have the female characters in the household. So you have we have Elizabeth who is um Clarissa's daughter. Clarissa's daughter, who's often described as being like a hyacinth. So flowers run through the book. Go on, Tabby. But she is aware of this and she kind of rolls her eyes at it. She sort of dreads the fact that people start comparing her to trees and flowers and stuff because she's a young beauty and she's going to be a young society lady and all she wants to do is play with her dog in the countryside. And then there's another character who is Elizabeth's tutor, history tutor, Miss Kilman, who the implication is is kind of in love with Elizabeth. She's kind of a caricature of an earnest, self-improving middle class woman. And she she gets a very, very negative portrayal. She's kind of ugly, nasty, aggressive, greedy. She's constantly wolfing down a clairs. That tea scene's very unpleasant because Elizabeth is trying to extract herself from this this massive bore. Miss Kilman's stuffing herself with the eclairs. She keeps going on about how no one likes her whilst shovelling in more eclairs. So here again, if you're a Virginia Wolf a phobe or a wolf sceptic, Miss Kilman is ev is sort of grist to your mill. Because Miss Kil man is the middle class character with her cheap Macintosh, which Clarissa Dalloway despises. She's always stuffing herself with the Clares, she is shown as she moans a lot. You know, moony, greedy, nasty, she's described as ugly, all of this kind of thing. And actually, critics like John Kerry or Claire Tomalin have said of um Miss Kilman, this is Virginia Wolves snobbery coming out. She's basically taking the self improving, earnest, middle class character and presenting them as a complete monster because this is how Virginia Woolf thought of these kinds of people. I in a way I think it's quite nuanced of her to to write a character who is worthy and a feminist, all the you know, all the things that she sort of stands for, but is also ghastly. You know, it'd be insincere to say that all people who kind of are virtuous and um, you know, a bit of frumpy or or a feminist all wonderful people. She doesn't put all women on a pedestal, and I think that's important. And she kind of by redeeming Clarissa with her love of society and her flowers and her fine clothes, I don't know, it's kind of like she's been quite innovative with her feminism. You know, she's allowing feminists to be liberated from kind of dowdiness. They can also be women of all kinds, I suppose. What about Septimus? So let's talk about Septimus. Now we haven't really talked about him. He is the other main character of the book, a massive part of the book. He is the shell shocked first world war veteran who Clarissa never actually crosses paths with him. They never meet . But I think it's generally accepted by readers that Septimus is Clarissa's double. So definitely. I mean this is affected what Virginia Wolfe herself said herself. She said basically , it's as though Septimus is another version of Clarissa. They are both characters whose grip on reality is fragile, who are worried about splintering. In Septimus's case, she carries that to the extreme because Septimus does hear voices, he does see hallucinations, he thinks that the birds are talking to him in ancient Greek, which is something that Virginia Wolfe herself had thought. So he's a a portrait of our own kind of mental health issues. Um and the sort of I think it's a it's a it's a groundbreaking depiction in fiction actually of somebody suffering from madness who's basically his grip on reality is splintering. And I think to me, he's not just shell shocked, he's he there's obviously something deeper because people from shell Shock didn't tend to hear voices and to be act you know, to think that you know monsters were coming to devour them and stuff they their shell shock manifested itself in perhaps more humdrum ways. And his story and what happens to him kind of runs in parallel with Mrs. Dalloway's story, doesn't it? This is how Virginia Wolf shows how how fine the line can be between sanity and insanity. He's actually kind of crossed over into madness, but Mrs. Dalloway is just as fractured. She's just as kind of unsteady. You know, she actually says at one point, she feels that her sanity is fragile. She had a perpetual sense of being out, out, far out to see and alone. She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. So they share this kind of heightened sensitivity. Both of their realities are slightly warped and distorted. But Clarissa still manages to toe the line and exist in in society. Septimus no longer can. It's not just Mrs. Dalloway. I mean Mrs. Kilman's kind of religious fanaticism slightly crosses over into madness at this point. It does. Yeah, definitely. This is one of the big things of the book, that the line between sanity and madness is always very thin. Yeah, and and you can see you know Virginia Wolf's dislike of doctors in the portrayal of um the doctors who treat Septimus, particularly the horrible ambitious William Bradshaw. He's kind of as oppressively sane and conventional. He has absolutely no individu individuality. He later calls Septimus a coward. Um, and that kind of very much reflects the attitudes to hysteria, hysteria brought on by um kind of the war or shell shock or whatever it may be at that time. Some some men were court martialed for kind of displaying these symptoms at the time. And Virginia Wolf knew people who suffered from shell shock or mental instability brought on by the war, for instance, Seafrid Sassoon. So I don't think she would have thought well of this kind of an attitude. But I guess the other thing that Septimus and Mrs. Delaway have in common is they're both trapped by their own memories to some extent. Because Septimus is always looking back to this relationship he had with the guy who was killed in the war, who was his great friend called Evans. And she, of course, is looking back to um to her time when she was a teenager with Sally and all this kind of thing. They're looking back to this lost parad ise and this idea of loss and nostalgia and melancholy that absolutely permeates the book and it becomes stronger and stronger as we reach the end. Septimus makes his terrible decision. Did he can't face the future. He throws himself out of his window onto some railings down below. A horrible ending. The interesting thing there as well is that Virginia Woolf had initially in her first drafts or whatever, she had initially planned for Mrs. Dalloway to kill herself at the end of the novel. And then she transplants that onto Septimus. So you can see the link there as well. But that in a way brings us I mean that brings us very nicely to the end of the book, which is the party finally h appens. Um and are haunted by regret and loss and all of this kind of thing. They're all worried about aging and they're all worried about death and all that. But the party in itself, is it a kind of celebr ation of life. There are disappointments. So Sally finally arrives at the party, and Sally is unbelievably boring. She's married to an industrialist from Manchester who, worst of all, we're told is bald, so he must be a terri ble man. And he's and she keeps the one thing she keeps telling everyone is I have five sons. I have five sons. Yeah, exactly. She's defined by her motherhood, which she shouldn't be, and she's also incredibly you know obsessed with money, which again she shouldn't. It's all very disappointing. But all the characters have massive disappointments. I mean Clarissa worries that her life has been kind of shallow and passionless. Her husband's political career never achieved the heights he set out to. Uh, Septimus, who kind of dreamed of being a poet in his life before the war, he had his mind and his beliefs and his kind of heart shattered in a way. Sally Seaton, where we've already discussed what happens to her. Peter Walsh, he never filled any of his literary ambitions. Doris Kilman, a former intellectual, has become kind of a r an embittered religious fanatic. And you know, you see, as we said, Lady Bruton kind of dreaming back to her girlhood. And I find this element of the book so so heartbreaking 'cause of the way that they all recall the past. And it's that thing from Gatsby, you know, you can't bring the cup the past back. But the thing with this is it makes it even sadder. None of them have any like none of them believe for one second you can bring the past back. There's this one character at the end, Clarissa's old nurse, who's taking their coats and the cloakroom and he knew them all as youngins, as young, bright things, and then is seeing them all kind of old , a bit weary, a bit stolid. And um then you know, when Clarissa Dalloway hears about Septimus's death from the doctor at her party, she says, Oh, death at my party. And that's definitely true in more ways than one. You know, they're all hovering on the brink of a new world as well. The old world is dying, their world, this world of kind of aristocrats and glittering parties. But also all of them. All that is true. I think that's absolutely true. It is it is shadowed by regret and by death. And yet I actually find the last couple of pages of that book Yeah. I find them weirdly moving. I mean genuinely. When I when I when I read the end, yeah, they're sort of sitting Mrs. Dalloway's chatting, the party's kind of breaking up, her friends Sally and and um Peter, both who loved her in their different ways, are sort of sitting together and they haven't seen each other for years, and it's all a bit sort of sad, and they're all a bit disappointed. And yet there's this lovely moment where Richard, who has been like a complete bore throughout her Tory MB husband, he looks and he sees his daughter Elizabeth, and he thinks who was that lovely girl, and suddenly he realized that it was his Elizabeth and he had not recognised her. She looked so lovely in her pink frock, and he feels, you know, a sort of surge of love for her, and he goes and tells her, and it makes her happy . And then Sally is watching them and she says, Oh, Richard's not as bad as we thought, is he? He's improved. You're right, I should go and talk to him. And then she says this line, what does the brain matter compared with the heart? Which You see from that that you know she isn't entirely she hasn't entirely lost her youthful passions and in that and in so many other ways, Wolf allows them to be so much more than the sum of their kind of humdrum disappointment s, you know, their jobs, their love lives, whatever it is, you know, the soul beneath can be more than that. Yeah. And a big part of it I think is just the fact that they all kind of it's a love of people they all find something to kind of love and admire in each other, it it recognising each other's flaws and stuff, and that's lovely. And it's also Elaine Scholter, who who writes the introduction to the copy of Mr. Dowith I was reading. She says that the party at the end is a comic pageant in which life itself is the cause of celebration. And that's definitely true. So much of the hope from that ending comes from the fact that it's all about kind of accepting that life may be utterly ordinary and extraordinary for that and accepting that one is getting older and accepting that you know the past is dead, but kind of looking, stepping into the next phase of life willingly. But the very last lines of the book, so uh Pizza is sitting for and he thinks what is this terror, what is this ecstasy, what is this that fills him with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said, for there she was. And has the last the last couple of lines of the book. I actually find that like I was worried I was gonna break down reading that 'cause I just find that really weirdly moving. Feel free to, honestly, I think that would be really nice. Tabi and I know you would be merciless, which would be No, honestly I I'm hair. I just I just think there's the sort of affirmation of her at the end of the book. Somebody is watching her and there she is. Yeah. And you know, as as fragmented and as fragile as she is , you know, that they still they're still bound together by their childhood memories and all that sort of stuff. So we're gonna mark this. Uh I think you had a good idea, which is we are gonna mark it in terms of uh Miss Kilman's Eclairs. Just because we've gone on so long, I'll be very quick about it. I'm actually going to give this ten out of ten. Um I don't massively care for Virginia Wolf was a person. Uh but I think you know I'd never have got on with her in a million years. The art should speak for itself. The art speaks for itself, exactly. I think the art I could I I will read this book for as long as I live. I think it's a brilliant book. Yeah, I agree. I'm I'm also giving it ten out of ten. That's a double ten out of ten, two weeks running, by the way. She succeeds in everything she's trying to do. It makes you long for this past. The writing is just exquisite, you know, you're lost in this kind of rhythm of thought and sensation, and it's laid and it's fragmented and it's ebbing and flowing, but you feel everything that you're meant to feel. Yeah, it's great. All right, now before we go, we haven't quite finished 'cause we have some very exciting news. The book club, this show is taking to the stage for the very first time in September. This is so exciting. Huge news. So we will be on at the South Bank Centre as part of Gorhangers The Rest is Fest weekend. We will be on on the evening of the fifth of September. We will be chatting about books in a in a witty and entertaining way. That's yeah. Yeah. For the first time for the first time. We'd save it for the live show. So um please do get your tickets now. We don't want them to sell out. Well, I mean we do want them to sell out but, we don't want you to personally to miss out. Yeah. So get your tickets now and you can come and see us live and tell us what you think of the show. Absolutely. And also if you'd like to tell us what you thought of Mrs. Dalloway, this is a book club, so we'd love to hear what you guys think . Or if you have any other book suggestions that you'd like us to do on the show, you can email us at the bookclub at goalhanger.com or you can send in your comments to book club podh on x and ditto bookclub Pod HQ on Instagram. And what have we got coming up? A massive change of tone next week as we do The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. And then coming up after that, by popular demand, we are doing the picture of Dorian Gray. We're doing one of my favourite books, uh, The Code of the Worcesters by P.G. Woodhouse. We're doing Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Again, by popular demand, we are doing a Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. We'll be doing The Wind in the Willows. And we will be doing again by popular demand, we are nothing if not Democratic. Giovanni Tamasi Di Lampedusa's book, The Leopard. So lots to look forward to. Thank you, Tabby. Bye-bye. Bye