735 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (with Mark Hussey) | My Last Book with Graham Watson

Summary

The History of Literature, Episode 735: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (with Mark Hussey) | My Last Book with Graham Watson

Release date: September 22, 2025
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guests: Mark Hussey; Graham Watson
Podcast Network: The Podglomerate

---

Overview

This episode of The History of Literature dives into Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway in honor of the novel’s 100th publication anniversary. Host Jacke Wilson is joined by distinguished Woolf scholar Mark Hussey, author of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel, for an illuminating discussion of Woolf’s life, her artistic intentions with the novel, and its critical legacy. The episode concludes with the recurring "My Last Book" segment, featuring Brontë biographer Graham Watson, who chooses Woolf’s diaries as his final read, offering insight into their literary and personal significance.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Virginia Woolf’s Place in Literary History

• Wilson opens by celebrating the enduring power of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s uniquely vivid portrayal of inner life.
  • "It's one thing to say you're going to write in a stream of consciousness style... It's another thing to fill your pages with sentences like this one: 'She had the perpetual sense... of being out, out, far out to sea and alone.'" (04:00)
• Francesca Wade’s Guardian article guide on “Where to Start with Virginia Woolf” is discussed, with Mrs. Dalloway recommended as the entry point for readers drawn to explorations of self and society. (14:00–17:00)

2. Mark Hussey on Discovering and Teaching Woolf

• Hussey shares his 50-year relationship with Woolf’s work, beginning with To the Lighthouse during his high school years.
  • "It's a book that I find is very significant in her treatment of just what it's like to experience being human. And that's really what drew me to Woolf, I think." (22:40)
• He reflects on evolving student responses, noting increased empathy for Septimus Smith in recent decades due to greater awareness of trauma and PTSD.
  • "I've noticed... students... very much responded to her depiction of Septimus Warren Smith, who is a traumatized war veteran... (PTSD) is so commonly talked about that I think it became easier..." (25:00)

3. Woolf’s Artistic and Personal Context

• When writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf was coming into her own voice, feeling confident in her experimental approach after Jacob’s Room.
  • "I've discovered at the age of 40, how to say something in my own voice..." (paraphrased from Woolf, 27:00)
• Woolf’s challenges with self-confidence are explored, including societal limitations on women and dismissive contemporaries, e.g., Arnold Bennett’s criticism.
  • "She is unconfident, I would say, probably because she knows what she's doing is not going to be understood by many people." (33:00)

4. The Artistic Project of Mrs. Dalloway

• Woolf aimed both to criticize the social system and to depict “the world seen by the sane and insane side by side”—embodied by Clarissa and Septimus.
  • "She wants to criticize the social system... and she wants to show the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side." (38:44)
• The novel set itself against "materialist" fiction by focusing on interiority, what Woolf called "the dark places of psychology."
  • "What people are interested in now is what goes on inside our heads... rather than pages and pages of description." (41:00)

5. Characters and Sources of Inspiration

• Clarissa Dalloway first appeared in Woolf’s debut novel; her character draws both from a real-life friend and Woolf’s own sensibilities (her attraction to and ambivalence about parties, for example).
  • "Clarissa was modeled on a childhood friend... but the Clarissa of Mrs. Dalloway... is a more complex character." (45:30)
• Woolf's “frock consciousness” (the psychological impact of dress and presentation) is discussed along with the influence of Woolf’s circle and social position. (47:00–50:00)

6. Woolf’s Modernist Approach to Time & Memory

• The narrative structure is intricately linked to modernism’s concern with subjective time—external time marked by Big Ben, internal time experienced through memory.
  • "Time is experienced so differently than how the clock measures it out… We are immersed in the consciousness of this woman of 52, simultaneously with the 18 year old version of her." (50:49, 70:47)

7. Publication Reception and Changing Reputation

• Initial reception (1925) praised Woolf’s innovation but often misunderstood or ignored Septimus’s storyline, reading the novel largely as a subtle love story.
  • "A lot of the reviews tended to think of it as almost sort of a love story... They didn't really understand what was going on with Septimus." (54:25)
• Over time, feminist critics and shifting social awareness transformed Woolf’s reputation into that of an icon and central modernist figure.

8. The Enduring Appeal and Influence of Mrs. Dalloway

• The novel’s lasting popularity is attributed to its depth, its manageable structure (a single day), the mystery of Septimus and Clarissa’s connection, and its invitation to reader collaboration and interpretation.
  • "You can read it again and again, and it's like turning a crystal in the light. It will catch different glints each time." (68:56)

9. Everyday Life and Literary Epiphany

• The significance of “ordinary” days, and how Woolf reveals their extraordinariness through psychological immersion.
  • "Life doesn't happen always in big moments. It's also there in the small, ordinary moments of every day." (74:00)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the challenge and reward of Woolf’s style:
  "It's very difficult to pull out, you know, a quote because you're thinking, okay, I'll start here. But then—oh, it's so seamless, it feels sort of damaging to cut it off."
  —Mark Hussey (50:29)

• On what modernist fiction should achieve:
  "What she called the cotton wool of everyday life... what she found frustrating about the previous generation of novelists is that they were so focused on getting from tea to dinner... That's not really giving us who these people are."
  —Mark Hussey (72:00)

• On the book’s generative and collaborative power:
  "Reading fiction is a kind of collaboration between the writer and the reader... it does invite you to the party, in a sense."
  —Mark Hussey (68:30)

• On why Mrs. Dalloway persists:
  "It's a novel that examines the psychological aspects in such depth, and has this sort of mystery of what is this connection between Septimus and Clarissa... You can read it again and again, and it's like turning a crystal in the light."
  —Mark Hussey (68:56)

---

Important Timestamps

• Opening — Setting the theme, Mrs. Dalloway’s 100th anniversary: 03:00–06:30
• Francesca Wade’s reading roadmap for Virginia Woolf: 14:00–17:00
• Introducing Mark Hussey and his Woolf scholarship: 21:14–21:46
• Hussey on first reading Woolf (1972): 21:48–23:19
• Woolf’s growing critical reputation, feminist studies: 23:55–25:56
• Woolf’s personal and creative context during Mrs. Dalloway: 26:59–29:17
• Jacob’s Room as a modernist breakthrough: 29:23–31:08
• Discussion on Woolf’s psychological struggles, standing among contemporaries: 31:39–38:38
• Artistic vision for Mrs. Dalloway: 38:46–43:38
• Clarissa Dalloway’s origins & influences: 45:26–50:49
• Discussion on modernist time and memory: 50:49–54:25
• Reception in 1925 and shifting interpretations: 54:25–59:36
• Why Mrs. Dalloway remains influential: 61:45–70:47
• Woolf’s interest in ordinary moments and how they’re made extraordinary: 70:47–74:21

---

My Last Book with Graham Watson

Segment (77:03–83:54)

• Graham Watson’s choice: The Diary of Virginia Woolf
  • "It's full of love, light and color. It's full of changing moods and sensations. It's beautiful. It brings continual joy to anyone who reads it... It also maps Virginia Woolf's struggle with mental illness." (77:23)
• **Wilson & Watson discuss Woolf as a reader and critic, her interest in unearthing women’s voices from the literary past, and her unfinished project Anon on anonymous writers and erasure from the canon.
• "She was absolutely, passionately interested in the details of other people's lives... she wanted to bring that out and say, it's also valuable." —Graham Watson (81:10)

---

Tone & Style

Jacke Wilson’s warm, engaging style encourages rich, accessible literary exploration. The episode blends personal reflections with rigorous scholarship, demystifying Woolf’s experimental genius while making her work inviting to newcomers and long-time fans alike.

---

Key Takeaways

• Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a modernist experiment in depicting consciousness, connecting the "sane and insane" in post-WWI England.
• The novel’s initial mixed reception evolved as feminist criticism and cultural shifts highlighted its depths and relevance, particularly regarding trauma.
• Clarissa Dalloway, both as an individual and as an archetype, resists easy categorization and invites endless interpretation—a fact central to the book’s enduring appeal.
• Woolf’s revolutionary focus on interiority changed the novel’s possibilities, granting legitimacy to the minutiae and flux of daily life.
• The episode’s closing segment on Woolf’s diaries underscores their richness as a literary long-term project and testament to the value of everyday existence and of reading itself.

---

For newcomers: This episode provides a thoughtful, approachable roadmap into Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, and the joys of literary discovery.

Transcript

[A]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello dear listeners and my friends. This is Jack Wilson reminding you that the History of Literature Podcast is going on tour. It's still a few months away, but the deadline is this month, September. That's your chance to put down your deposit if you would like to go. Let me tell you a little more about the trip. In May of 2026, I will be accompanying a small group of travelers on a trip through London, Oxford and Bath with stops at literary sites, houses of authors, restaurants where they ate and so on. There will be a chance to meet some like minded people as we all enjoy literature and life. Nice hotels and restaurants, lots of meals and fellowship, traveling together in the land of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Dr. Johnson and more. And some special guests, people you've heard on the show will be joining us to shake our hands and answer our questions and generally participate in this celebration of books and writers and all the things we like best here at the podcast. As I said though, the signup is only open through September. That's so we can plan the trip. That's right, you have until the end of the month to secure your spot. So head over to John Shores Travel, that's our partner who's taking care of all the logistics, and put down your deposit. That's John Shores S H O R S. Or you can go to historyofliterature.com and follow the links there. Join us for an experience you can't get anywhere else because you deserve it. Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Race the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today at LinkedIn.com campaign terms and hello. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And with that opening sentence, we are delivered into the world of a woman in London in the period just after the Great war or the First World War, World War I, as we now call it. Who is arranging a party? The party is more or less a party, but the party giver is extraordinary. A literary character whose sensibility comes to life in a way that still invigorates the mind. We know Clarissa Dalloway in a way we rarely know anyone in life or in art. It's one thing to say you're going to write in a stream of consciousness style or say you're going to put people inside a character's head. It's another thing to fill your pages with sentences like this one. She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far, out to sea and alone. She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. This inner life, so vivid, so compelling, manages to be both recognizably true, even familiar, and yet utterly surprising. It's a mind just like ours, and maybe just a bit beyond ours. I said we know Clarissa Dalloway. Maybe I should say we know part of her and we want to know more, in that she's a bit like her extraordinary creator, the author Virginia Woolf, who wrote many fine books. Mrs. Dalloway is my favorite party Party who will come to my party? Mrs. Dalloway gives parties to cover the silence we are told. But in the silence we have thoughts. And thanks to Virginia Woolf's immersion into the thoughts of her characters, we have room to reflect and admire. To borrow Virginia Woolf's formulation, which she applied to George Eliot, this is a book for grown up people. Our guest today has written a book about Mrs. Dalloway. How the novel was written, how it was received, what it has meant to readers for the past 100 years. Mrs. Dalloway, the biography of a novel with Mark Hussey today on the history of literature. Hello everyone. How are you? I hope you're enjoying September. I'm Jack Wilson, your host. Let's get straight to it. Here we go. We start with an email from listener Carol, who recently listened to episode number 185, Marcel Proust Dear Jack, I have enjoyed your podcast for years. Although I am not a well read person, I have in the past few years intentionally tried to expand my knowledge of great literature beyond my college courses circa 1970, including the Divine Comedy, the Iliad, Chaucer, Austen, Melville, Hardy, etc. After determining to start a Remembrance of Things Past, I searched out your podcasts on Proust and was especially taken with your college test question on the little phrase. It has really stayed with me as I am reading Swan's Way, provoking a lot of thought. I listened to your show while walking and do want to express to you how much I enjoy them and appreciate them. Three of my favorite memories are your story of the trek from being marooned in Tibet to Morocco. That was in the Flaubert episode Madame Bovary, the talk with Sarah Rudin on Virgil and a quote from Hardy on the stars. Thank you Carol. Well, I was excited to get that email and I wrote to Carol asking if she minded if I would if I could share it with listeners. And she wrote back, Dear Jack, thank you for your reply. I would be tickled pink to have you shared. I look forward with great anticipation to that episode. Your shows were a constant companion on my recent 8 mile walk. I am on a Shakespeare kick now and finally can say I loved Hamlet. It's been a long journey from my 10th grade class trip to see the play and I read Kidnapped after listening to your Robert Louis Stevenson episode. So many more I could mention, but I'll stop here. Sincerely, Carol. Okay, Carol, Carol, Carol, Carol, Carol. Maybe my ideal listener, although it seems I hear from ideal listeners at least once a day, maybe more often. You're all ideal listeners, every single one of you. But let's run this down. Here's Carol who tells us she went to college circa 1970, so about 50 years ago. A little more. I'll let you do the math on that. And here she is taking eight mile walks and reading. She has read Dante, Homer, Chaucer, Austin, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson and others. There was an etc. In there. And yet she begins her first email by telling me and us that she is not a well read person. Carol, you are a well read person and a complete inspiration and I hope you know that. Thank you very much for sending me those emails which have made me think a lot about what it would be like to approach literature after such a long gap. It's been such a big part of my life for such a long and constant period of time. I think it would probably be good a good thing. But guess what? I'm not going to take a gap. So I guess I'll never know. But it sounds like the return to literature has been good for Carol and Carol has been good for me. Always good to get some energy from some unlikely sources and to get energy from some likely sources too. Which is why I put solar panels on my roof. The sun being the likeliest source of energy ever devised by man. Those ancient geniuses who somehow invented the sun and launched it into the sky so they could build their pyramids next to Stonehenge, never fail to amaze me. How did they do it? You might note that Carol did not mention Virginia Woolf, although maybe Wolf was one of the authors included in the Etc or the and more. Which reminds me of the time when I helped a woman with her scientific book. I helped do the editing for it. And she came into my office and, and showed me the acknowledgments and said, thanks to my mentor so and so and my colleagues so and so and so and so and many others. And she pointed to the many others and she said, that was you. You're in there. You're included in the others. So maybe Virginia Woolf made it into the others. But if not, or actually even if so, we have an article by Francesca Wade of the Guardian to help us out. Guardian newspaper. This was published on May 14 of this year, which happened to have been the 100th birthday of the publication of the book we're going to be discussing today. Mrs. Dalloway. And the title of the Guardian article by Francesca Waite is Where to Start with Virginia Woolf. So Carol and any others who are looking to start with Virginia Woolf. Here you go. The article begins as her much loved novel, Mrs. Dalloway turns 100. Now is a great time to celebrate Virginia Woolf. The 20th century modernist author and pioneer of stream of consciousness narration, is one of the most celebrated British novelists of all time. For those looking to become more familiar with her work, author and critic Francesca Waid has put together a guide to her greatest hits. End quote. And the article has some helpful categories to put you in the right frame of mind to connect yourself to the appropriate work by this beloved and admired author. For example, there's a category called Her Breakthrough. So if you want to start there. And Wade notes that Woolf's first two novels, the Voyage out and Night and Day, are bold in their subject matter, but relatively conventional in form. But then on a fateful trip in December of 1910 to an exhibition of post impressionist artists like Matisse and Cezanne, Woolf was filled with new ideals about how to create a character by unconventional means. New ideals, new ideas maybe, about how to create a character by unconventional means. It's the novel in which Woolf found her voice, as she herself later claimed. And the novel was called Jacob's Room. So if you want to start with a breakthrough, that's where you go. Jacob's Room. Are you looking for the most quotable Virginia Woolf? Well, Wade recommends Woolf's two book length feminist essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Would you like a challenge? Wade suggests Wolf's novel the Waves, which is told in a rhythmic chorus of five voices which Wolf composed in a kind of trance. End quote. Might be the boldest experiment in Wolf's career. But as we often see, bold experiments are worth the time it takes to dig into. They're often the most beloved works, most beloved by superfans. We see this with everything from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album. Are you pressed for time? Wade points you toward Woolf's short essays, observations about the city, book reviews, essays about writing, and do you want the masterpiece? Then Wade says you should go to Woolf's most personal novel, to the Lighthouse. Now, I've skipped over two categories, but we'll circle back. We'll save one of them for the end of the show. The other one I'll give you now. But first I have to tell you that we are approaching a deadline for you to sign up for the History of Literature podcast tour. I made sure that we included Bloomsbury in the tour through Literary England. It is such an important neighborhood for the history of literature. It's almost like those times when you hear that California is the world's fourth largest economy or that Brooklyn on its own would be America's third largest city, just edging Chicago. How vast is New York if one of its five boroughs on its own would be the third largest city? And how big is America if just one of its 50 states has a bigger economy than Japan? Similarly, how incredible is London that Bloomsbury itself, just Bloomsbury would probably be the third or fourth most important city in the history of English literature. But I was telling you about our tour. In May of next year, we, Emma and I, are going to travel to England to visit some of our most cherished literary sites. We start in London visiting Dr. Johnson's house. We'll go to Shakespeare's Globe Theater and Wolf's Bloomsbury neighborhood. The Charles Dickens House is there. And we will stay at a nice hotel and get together with the group because, yes, yes, you can join us on this trip. It's going to be a holiday to remember and we'll have our breakfast together. We ride on the trains together, lunches, evening meals, and so on. With all the logistics handled for us by the expert partners at John Shores Travel, all you have to do is buy your plane ticket to get to London. And the John Shores team handles everything else. We get to relax, visit, discuss, rest up, and do it all over again the next day. From London, we'll go to Oxford for a visit of the famous libraries there and. And the haunts of the inklings, the beautiful buildings, the culture we can soak up. And from there we go to Jane Austen's bath, also Mary Shelley's bath. Don't forget her. And then we'll, once we're there, we'll hop back into the life of the Regency period and it's going to be grand and wonderful. I can't wait to meet some of you and get to know you a little bit. Although there will also be time for you to be on your own if you wish. Do a little resting, a little shopping, a little writing. Maybe it's all inclusive. And if you're comparing the price against other travel packages by other providers, please do note a couple of things. One is that what the other providers call all inclusive often doesn't include things like meals or transport. Or they might provide one meal a day. That's not all inclusive, my friends, so keep that in mind. And the second thing to keep in mind, the biggest reason to go or the thing I'm most excited about are the company we're going to keep with one another, all fans of literature, and the surprise guests that I am lining up so we can be visited by experts, scholars and authors, friendly experts, many of whom have been on the podcast already and are some of my favorite people in the world. So that's John Shores Travel. You can find the itinerary there, Shores without an e. Or you can follow the links from historyofliterature.com to check out the schedule and the dates and all the logistics. I hope you can join us. Back to Francesca Wade in the Guardian article I told you that she offered up two more recommendations in her article on where to begin with Virginia Woolf. We'll save one for the end of the podcast, but here's the other right now, the entry point. Here you go, Carol. In case you haven't read Virginia Woolf yet, here is the recommended entry point. Woolf's fiction often explores the relationship between self and society, turning on the disjunct between her character's private desires and other people's expectations of them. And one of the best examples of this is Mrs. Dalloway. From its opening line, Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Woolf plunges readers into the inner thoughts of her heroine, Clarissa, a society hostess running errands around London in preparation for a party she's holding that June night. Among the people whose paths intersect with hers that June day is a shell shocked war veteran, Septimus Smith. Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted in Mrs. Dalloway to dig out beautiful caves behind her characters. The invisible depths and connections she creates between them give the novel a sense of holding all life within it. End quote. What a marvelous description of a miraculous book. Happy birthday, Mrs. Dalloway. For more on this miraculous book, let's talk to Mark Hussey, who has written a book about the book. We'll do that after this.

[B]

Foreign.

[A]

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Hey folks, if you're like me, you find yourself looking for help in some strange places. Like the Woman who Cuts My Hair. Very nice person. But if you're dealing with serious problems like anxiety, depression or other clinical issues, you need guidance from a credentialed therapist. At BetterHelp, you fill out a short questionnaire and they match you with one of their more than 30,000 online professionals. They have a strong track record of getting the match right, but of course you can always pause your subscription or switch therapists at any time and at no extra cost. It's a system designed to help you fit therapy into your busy life. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of Expertise. Find the one with Better Help our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com literature that's BetterHelp H E-L-P.com literature I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the Internet last year and I think this this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online and in store. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites, and pin messages so no one forgets Mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com.

[B]

Foreigning Me now.

[A]

Is Mark Hussey, who is Distinguished professor of English Emeritus at Pace University in New York. He is founding editor of Wolf Studies Annual and general editor of the Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, for which he edited to the Lighthouse. His recent publications include Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism and Modernism's Print Cultures, which he wrote with Faye Hamill. He's here today to discuss his new book, Mrs. Biography of a Novel. Mark Hussey. Welcome to the history of Literature.

[B]

Thanks very much.

[A]

So you've been reading this book for more than 50 years. How did that first reading of Mrs. Dalloway in 1972 affect you?

[B]

Gosh, well, actually, as I say in the book, I've forgotten now how it affected me because it was rather a long time ago, but it was at a time I was still in. I grew up in England and did all my education there, so I was still in high school. And I had at the time to prepare for exams that were basically your college entrance exam. You had a two year curriculum. And our English teacher recommended that we all read something that was not on the syllabus just for our own interest. And he threw out a bunch of titles. And I randomly chose to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. And that was how I got hooked. So I started reading all the books I could find. And when I opened my copy of Mrs. Dalloway last year, I saw that I'd bought it in 1972. It's a book I've read many times, and I. I think the reason, I find it difficult to pin down how I felt about it at that time is that it grew into part of my sort of mental landscape. And it's a book that I find is very significant in her treatment of just what it's like to experience being human. And that's really what drew me to Woolf, I think.

[A]

Yeah, right. Okay. So before we jump into the book and Virginia Woolf, I wanted to ask sort of another question about the span of time that's happened since you first were reading Virginia Woolf. She was such a dominant figure in literature courses and feminist studies in the 1980s and 1990s when I was in school. It's kind of hard for me to imagine what things were like in reading her in the early 1970s. Have you, over the years, have you seen a change in the way students approach Virginia Woolf?

[B]

Yeah, definitely. Maybe when I was in college myself, I wasn't so aware of it, but certainly having gone into that teaching profession, I have been. And I think the significant change in Woolf's reputation was under the influence of feminist critics, particularly American feminist critics in the late 60s and 70s. And there was a lot of attention to who was missing from the canon, the syllabus. So there was a lot of revision. And Woolf became, as one critic has called her, an icon of that movement. And of course, her own feminist writings, most famously, probably her essay A Room of One's Own influenced that. But I think that over the span of my Teaching career. I definitely have noticed with Mrs. Dalloway in particular, that students who might not have really related to it much in the 80s, say, when I began to teach in the U.S. gradually, I've noticed that students, the last sort of few cohorts of students I taught very much responded to her depiction of Septimus Warren Smith, who is a traumatized war veteran. And, of course, so many students now either have served in the military or they have members of their family who have. And also, there's just such an awareness of what we now call PTSD at the time was called shell shock. And various sort of manifestations of trauma have become so commonly talked about that I think it became easier in a way for me to have students find a way into quite a challenging novel if they're not used to modernist narrative fiction, to talk about how she's representing a young man whose mind has been broken by war. And they tended to get that immediately.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But if you look at the history of responses to Woolf over the last hundred years, say it's a. As it would be for any major writer. It's a kind of map of changing cultural norms and interests. And certainly the feminist critics of the late 60s and 70s brought Woolf into the foreground in a way that she hadn't been previously. And she, in her own country, she and the rest of her cohort, Bloomsbury particularly, underwent a real sort of backlash in the 50s. She was considered a good stylist, but without much substance. You know, rather very narrow canvas that she was working on. I think for critics of the 50s to talk about her as a war novelist would have just made them laugh. But not now.

[A]

Yeah, right. I was gonna say, the one thing that I would think she would not be accused of today is being substanceless. Okay, so who was Virginia Woolf when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway? Where was she in her life and career?

[B]

By the time she began thinking about it, she had finished her third novel. She'd written two novels, the Voyage out and Night and day, published in 1915 and 1919. And then the first stirrings of what becomes Mrs. Dalloway, she actually jots down in the notebook that she's using to draft her third novel, Jacob's Room. And one of the, I think, most significant diary entries that she makes around the time that she's thinking about Mrs. Dalloway is she says something like, I've discovered at the age of 40, how to say something in my own voice. I mean, that's not verbatim. So it's a time when she's beginning to feel more confident about the experiments that she's making. But she's. By then, she has. She's about to turn 40, and she is already a pretty regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. She and her husband have started a press which is beginning to have some success. You know, they published Katherine Mansfield and T.S. eliot, and she is becoming recognized as a literary figure. But her own life. She, as you probably know, she had a series of mental breakdowns. So her husband, quite soon after they married, had decided it was, on the advice of her doctors, better to take her out of the sort of whirlwind of London, and they moved to Richmond, which at the time was a very quiet suburb. So as she begins, Mrs. Dalloway, she's feeling a sort of new confidence. And she's also, over the years that she drafts the novel, starts to sort of chafe at being out in the suburbs and longing to get back into the swim of things, which she does during the course of the writing. She's a woman who comes from a sort of distinguished family line. Her father was quite an eminent Victorian man of letters, Leslie Stephen. But in terms of her own thinking about her writing, I think she's really sort of getting into her groove. And Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that comes out of a quite productive and settled period for her.

[A]

And I think you point out that Jacob's Room had helped. Her husband had called it a work of genius.

[B]

Yeah, he was always quite positive. It was a break, certainly, with the tradition of fiction. And as I said, she and her husband had begun this press on the Hogarth Press, which was literally on their dining room table. And their first publication was a pamphlet called Two Stories, in which each of them wrote a story. She tended to call hers Sketches. Hers was a mark on the wall. And she had written. While she was thinking about what would come next, she'd written a number of these sketches, as she called them. And thinking about Jacob's Room, she wondered how she would be able to do that at the length of a novel. And that was what she did in Jacob's Room. Jacob's Room is a. It really follows the story of a young man from childhood, and then he sort of disappears into the First World War. He's killed in the war. And I used to think of it as almost like turning the pages of a photograph album, because Jacob is represented through how he affected other people. So you see him in various settings, and it's almost like, here is young Jacob on the beach with his brother. Here he is going off to school here, he is at university here. So it's almost like these sort of images of a life. And then in the final scene of the novel, it's clear that he has not come back from the war. His mother is clearing out his flat with his best friend and she holds up a pair of his shoes and says, what am I to do with these? And this is very poignant moment at the end. So she was experimenting at the length of a novel, and that is what gave her the sort of pathway into Mrs. Dalloway.

[A]

I'm kind of wondering why exactly. I mean, she seems so intelligent and so accomplished. It's hard for me to imagine that she didn't feel confidence in herself as a writer until her mid to late 30s and into her early 40s. Why do you think it was? I mean, was it because. Was it something specific to her? Was it the way that women were regarded in society, or what was preventing her from feeling the confidence that she didn't feel until later?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting question. I don't really like to speculate about her psychology too much, but I think that that struggle that she often has, she's a writer who is very articulate about her own struggles with creativity. When she writes, she uses her diary as a sort of workshop of this is the challenge I'm facing and this is what I hope to achieve. And so she's a very useful guide to her own process as a writer. But I think that the lack of confidence that she talks about, having overcome, is partly because the sort of mainstream critics, like particularly Arnold Bennett, who was a very, very popular and successful writer at the time, had used Jacob's Room as an example of what was wrong with young writers who were trying these. Because, of course, Woolf, you know, is an exact contemporary of James Joyce. She's writing alongside him and who's works are just beginning to be published around the early 20s. And. Well, I shouldn't say that, but Portrait of the Artist has come out and then Ulysses is being serialized. So Arnold Bennett wrote this review in which he used Jacob's Room as an example of this modern tendency that he felt was really a dead end. And most famously, he said that she can't create characters, they don't vitally survive in the mind. And I think that was something that did challenge her confidence. There's also. There's a moment where she's working on Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. eliot comes to visit and she feels that. And he sings the praises of James Joyce. And she writes in her diary that, oh, Eliot's visit has sort of knocked me off and probably what I'm trying to do is being done better by Mr. Joyce. So there's this. There is a feeling of like her being an innovator is exposing herself. And I think she often did feel that her writing, I mean, she gathers confidence as she goes on. But for many people, writing fiction is a kind of exposure, you know, making yourself vulnerable. And she was affected certainly by criticism. She could have her spirit stashed and raised within a day by reading, you know, either a negative and a positive review or a letter from a friend. So she. I think she is unconfident, I would say, probably because she knows what she's doing is not going to be understood by many people. And this, that was something I would often say when I was teaching students is that, you know, they're reading, you know, The Wasteland or Mrs. Dalloway. And I say now to you, these are, you know, these works that you see in bookshops and they're classics of the canon. But you have to try and understand that at the time they were read by a very small number of people and these were sort of, you know, the cutting edge avant garde works of their time. Similar in a way to how, you know, the. The artists that we all think of in terms of, you know, just extraordinary million dollar paintings or they're hung in galleries. But at the time. Right. The works of Van Gogh were dismissed by the establishment as mad and not really art. So it's a similar situation, I think, that sense that she was trying to forge a path of her own, but that would not be widely understood.

[A]

Yeah. And also she was such a good critic herself, and to have the ambition to not only write successful fiction, but to write literature, to have something that would be permanent and last and belong on the shelf with these great authors, Tolstoy and the others that she admired. I'm reminded of an anecdote I heard once of the critic Edmund Wilson, who went to Princeton with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he, you know, we both wanted to write novels, but I was competing with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Scott was willing to compete with pot boilers and popular fiction. And he wanted to be in the magazines. And so he kind of attributed that to. He had been his own kind of worst critic, and it had stifled him in a way that he knew what he was writing wasn't measuring up. And I wonder if she was just holding herself to such a high standard that it took a While for her to feel like she was able to write things that deserved the accolades that she was aiming for.

[B]

Yeah, obviously, writing this book about Dalloway, I went back over that whole period of her life quite closely, and one of the things that she said, I'm not very good at remembering the exact dates, but during that period, one of the things she says is she's sort of accepting that she's never going to be a popular writer. In that sense, she's not going to be a bestseller. Not like her friend Vita Satva west was, but that she has her own, what she called her queer individuality. And that's what people like about her writing, is that there is a note in her voice that does appeal to some people and that she's becoming accepting of that. That's an interesting story about Wilson and Fitzgerald, because I think one of the things that sometimes surprises people about Woolf is that she writes in several places about how there's a line. She says, it'll be a great shame if all the reading is done in libraries and not on the tube. And she says that the love of reading might begin with what she calls bad books, you know, the pot boilers. But that if you develop a love of reading, that will lead you to all kinds of literature and that. So although she's often, you know, regarded as a snob, which she admitted that she was in some respects, she's also someone who is a great advocate of just reading. Read whatever you want read. And, you know, her idea of the reader's freedom to choose and make judgments on their own is something that's very consistent. So I think that this. This time, right at the beginning of the 1920s, is when, as I said, she's sort of coming into her own, and she is accepting that she's not gonna write bestsellers, but she is going to do what she wants to do. And she is. Of course, she had her own press, which makes things a lot easier. She didn't have to argue with an.

[A]

Editor, except for the husband, who thinks she's a genius.

[B]

Right. Yeah.

[A]

So what was she setting out to do then, when she came to write Mrs. Dalloway? What was her artistic project?

[B]

Well, she says a couple of things as she's beginning to think about it. She wants to criticize the social system, to show it at work at its most intense. And she wants to show the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side. So she has this idea of exposing the workings of the social system as she sees it at the time. And also representing sane and insane consciousness. In other words, sort of this high society politician's wife, Clarissa, who is giving a party, and this young man whose mind has been broken by the experience of the war and what he went through there. So that, in a sense, is her object, but in a. You know, if you pull back a little bit, she's continuing a project that she really announces in an essay she wrote in 1919 called Modern Novels, which is really a manifesto where she says, look, the world that we have now after the First World War is a world which is very different from the one that is represented by the sort of the mainstream novelists. And she cites, famously, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. wells, and she calls them materialists. And she says that they are describing the outside. And she. This is sort of her opening salvo in a debate that went on through the 1920s about what does it mean to create character and what should a novel be like. And that was an essay that she revised slightly and republished in 1925 in the common Reader, which was a book of essays she was working on concurrently with writing Mrs. Dalloway. And she also published in 1924, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, in which she has this now quite famous anecdote about a woman called Mrs. Brown in a railway compartment and how different writers would try and represent her. And I think it's like boiling it down. Essentially. She's saying that what people are interested in now is what goes on inside our heads and giving us all kinds of data and facts. And she cites a novel of Bennett's called Hilda Lesways. And she says, you know, by the end of reading three pages, we know where she lived, how many buttons were on her coat, how much she paid in her rent, but we don't really know her. And she says a single line of insight would do more than those pages and pages of description. So in a sense, that is also what Mrs. Dalloway is about, is to try and get inside the consciousness of her characters and give readers a sense of their subjectivity. And that's, I think, what she achieves. There's a passage that I always think is a good example of that, when the character Peter Walsh bursts in on Clarissa, who he had courted when they were very young, when she was a teenager, and she had rejected his marriage proposal. And he. But they've always stayed in touch. He comes back after being away for five years and finds her at home mending her dress for her party that night. And that scene has very little actual dialogue, but a great deal of what is going on in their heads and all the thoughts that they're having. I mean, it's a very approachable way to understand that this happens to, to it. And I keep going back to how I taught this because it's something that I, I find when readers tell me, oh, you know, I picked up Mrs. Dalloway and I, I didn't know what was going on. I try and get them to just go back and see, see the novel on its own terms and recognize how ordinary a lot of it is in the sense that when we sit down with someone we haven't seen for years, say, as Peter and Clarissa doing, there might be all kinds of things going on in our heads that we don't say, but that will inform what we actually do say. For example, Peter thinks, oh, you know, she looks so old. And Clarissa thinks, oh, he hasn't changed a bit. But what they're saying to each other is just surface. It's like an iceberg. You know, you see the tip. But most of what's happening is under the surface. So I think that's something that she is making a conscious effort as a writer to do is to represent what she called in her essay modern fiction the dark places of psychology. That's what we're interested in now. It's what's, what's going on in people's head. Because of course, we can all choose not to reveal that.

[A]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Mark Hussey. The new Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is fire flavor.

[C]

Trust me, because I'm about to eat it.

[B]

That hits right away.

[A]

Attempt the Popeyes Hot Ones menu in stores.

[B]

Love that chicken from Popeyes.

[A]

Limited time in participating US Restaurants. This episode is brought to you by FXX and Hulu. An all new season of Futurama is back. Blending heartfelt moments with razor sharp humor while accidentally saving the day. The Planet Express crew is back, defying gravity and common sense. From the creator of The Simpsons comes 10 new episodes where the romance is hotter, the threats are bigger, and the action hits harder. Don't miss the all new season of Futurama. Watch it Mondays on FXX or streaming on Hulu. Okay, we're back. So, Mark, if Virginia Woolf is writing about this character, Clarissa Dalloway, one of the great characters in all of literature, and she's, she's intentionally trying to show us the interior life of a character like that, do we know if she was basing it on someone she knew was it, you know, was she trying to create a consciousness of someone else? Was she trying to put herself into the character? How did she come up with Clarissa Dalloway?

[B]

Yeah, well, one interesting thing about Clarissa is that she had actually appeared as a character in Woolf's first novel, the Voyage out, also with her husband Richard, who was a politician. And when she was writing that book, she told her sister Vanessa Bell that Clarissa was modeled on a childhood friend of theirs called Kitty Max, who had been a very beautiful, young, sort of debutante type woman who her mother had taken under her wing as a protege. Kitty had got engaged in the family garden to an editor named Leo Max. So the Clarissa of the Voyage out is close to that society woman that Woolf knew when she was young, but then she moved away with her siblings to Bloomsbury and lost touch with that high society world of Kensington that she'd grown up with. The Clarissa of Mrs. Dalloway has traces of that, but is not in any way as superficial as the Clarissa of the Voyage Out. She's a more complex character, and it's always difficult, I think, to trace, you know, any sort of one to one influence, unless a writer says it. But The Clarissa of Mrs. Dalloway is someone who has elements of Woolf's own personality. For example, she writes about how she is very attracted to parties. She likes the way that at a party we tend to sort of put on a different self. We get dressed up, we act maybe in a way that is different than in other circumstances in our lives. And there's something that is attractive to her in that. And she says in her diary, she gets that from her mother. She likes, you know, nice dresses and jewelry. But there are probably other elements of social situations. She had a complicated relationship with a woman named Mary Hutchinson, who was married to a barrister, St. John Hutchinson. And Mary was the longtime lover of Clive Bell, who was Virginia's brother in law, married to her sister Vanessa. And Mary was a very vivacious and very articulate, very glamorous hostess, also a writer herself. And Virginia had a sort of push and pull relationship with her over many years. And the. The kinds of glittering parties that Mary gave, I think, also inform Clarissa's characterization. And there's not so much in Clarissa herself, but one of the things that Woolf writes about which is relevant to Mrs. Dalloway is what she calls party consciousness or frock consciousness. How dress becomes something which for a woman like Clarissa is easy. She just, you know, says, pull out that dress. I'm going to wear that tonight. Whereas Virginia herself says, you know, it's. It's agony choosing what to wear because people are going to mock me or criticize me. And she has a character who comes to the party, Ellie, who is very self conscious about her old dress, and she's gone out and, you know, thrown a shawl around it to try and cover up how shabby it is. But that party consciousness is something that becomes significant in Mrs. Dalloway, because one of the things Clarissa is irked by is how many years before, many decades before, Peter Walsh had said to her she would be a perfect hostess in a sort of dismissive way that that's what your life's going to be. You're going to be a hostess. You're going to stand at the top of your stairs and welcome your guests. So I think that because Woolf grew up in a world that was kind of split between this intellectual, sort of bohemian world, but also came from a household, you know, her father and mother's household, where people like Henry James would drop by for tea. And as she says in an autobiographical piece, there's. She was sort of. The family had these fringes in the world of fashion, too, so the high society debutante type life. So she knew that world very well. And I think all of that feeds into Clarissa. One of the things you can probably notice when I start talking about any of this is I'll. I can go off into many different tangents. Right. Which is. Which is a little bit like this is. I think what is. What I love about Wolf, and also what some people find very challenging is that it's very difficult to. To pin down any one thing. I've always found it very difficult to pull out, you know, a quote because you think, okay, I'll start here. But then. Oh, it just. It's so seamless. It's. It. It feels sort of damaging to cut it off. So.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, well. And that seems to be the way her mind worked and the way that she viewed the workings of a mind, that the context is important and the. The whole flow is important. It's not just. We can't just pinpoint one fact or one thought in isolation.

[B]

Yeah. And she talks a lot about that in all kinds of different places, about how every moment is backed by the past. You can't really isolate, because whatever you're saying or thinking, there's all kinds of complexes surrounding that. I mean, I think, in a way, it's something that has always been commonly said about modernist writers is their treatment of time. And this is something in. In the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, where you have Big Ben striking the hour as it. As the day. So you know that this is taking place over a day. But also there are these moments where characters are leaping back and forwards in time. And there is this sense that time is experienced so differently than how the clock measures it out. And we all know that because, you know, we can have a week's vacation that feels like a day, or we can sit in an hour lecture that feels like a week. So it's. Our experience affects our sense of time. And there are these. One of the things that really struck me, this is just a sort of footnote. There's a moment in Regent's park in the novel, where suddenly the narrative shifts as the young woman called Maisie, Maisie Johnson, who asks Septimus and Lucretia for directions to the tube station. And she's just arrived in London from Edinburgh, age 19. And she comes upon this couple who are clearly in distress, and it unnerves her. And there's a moment where she says something like that. I can't remember the exact line, but it's basically that this. This moment will still echo in her memory 50 years from now. And I thought, oh, okay, this novel's set in 1923. So all of a sudden we're looking at Maisie in 1973. And I thought, oh, that's just around the time I started to read this book. And I thought, wow, it's just a. It's a. Not even a half of a sentence, but it suddenly leaps into that sense that this person in a park was affected by these two people sitting on a bench. And it will as. As it does for so many of us, that it will, for some reason, just lodge in her mind. And 50 years from now, she will be able to recall that moment. Oh, I was a young girl. I just came to London. I was very nervous, thought I'd made a mistake. So that kind of texture is an example of. What I mean is when you pull something out, it's difficult to sort of make it stand on its own. It's wobbly. But when you put it back in, as you were saying, this idea that everything is connected, everything is flowing, which is really how we. We experience life. And that is. I think that was her challenge. There's a. Somewhere, she says in her diary about Mrs. Dalloway, I have so many things. I want to put everything I've ever thought into this. And of course, the problem with writing is that it's got to come out in a linear one word after Another. But when we read it, we create something else. It's like. It's one thing to read, you know, we read, but as we read, we're building up this world. But it is. It's quite demanding on a reader's memory. Mrs. Dalloway. Well, all of all of her works are. But, you know, there are these echoes across the text that are quite difficult sometimes to hold on to.

[A]

Right, right. So how was the book initially received? Did it make much of a splash?

[B]

Yeah, it was generally well reviewed when it came out in 1925, it was the first book of hers that was published simultaneously in the US and in England. And it was well received as another example of this new form that was being labeled stream of consciousness. But one of the things that was quite striking about the early reviews is that they nearly all either ignored the character of Septimus or found it confusing. And she had acknowledged when she showed the manuscript to Leonard, her husband, who he was always her first reader. And she records in the diary that they agree that readers are going to have a difficult time with these parallel sort of twin stories of this woman, Clarissa, and Septimus the shell shocked soldier. So a lot of the reviews tended to think of it as a. Almost sort of a love story and treated Peter Walsh and Clarissa as the main characters and that the focus of the story was really on this love affair that had happened when they were young and how he had been rebuffed and how he had gone off and made a life on his own, but how they'd always remained connected. And so reviewers said they didn't really understand what was going on with Septimus. He seemed to not fit, in a way. So it took a while, I think, for reviewers and readers to understand what she was doing. Quite soon after it was published, like in 1928, she was asked by the Modern Library in the US to write an introduction for their edition of Mrs. Dalloway. And this is the only time she ever wrote an introduction for one of her own works. And in that short introduction, among other things, she talks about Septimus and Clarissa always in her mind, being doubles. And that really set off a whole new train of thought for critics, particularly in the us, about what the relationship was between Septimus and Clarissa. And in that introduction she says, which I believe she was actually making up, that in the first version of the novel, Clarissa was supposed to kill herself. But then Septimus is the one who. Who does. I've actually. There's no. As far as I know, there's no evidence in any draft or Any thinking about the novel where she says Clarissa was intended to kill herself. But that's what she writes in this introduction. Yeah, but also in that introduction, she stresses repeatedly that books belong to readers and that whatever an author might think, once the book is published, it's out there for people to make of it what they will. And she accepts that that's how fiction works in the world. So I think that it was by the time, you know, it was published in 1925, as, you know, and it was a time when she was quite well known as a literary critic, as someone who engaged in, you know, public. I guess we might call her a public intellectual now. Someone who engaged in debates and wrote letters to the literary magazines and the newspapers. So she was quite well known. She was becoming more popular in the U.S. she had been the subject of a quite long article in an American magazine called the Dial, which was a general interest, heavily literary magazine. And her brother in law, Clive, who is an art critic, had written a quite long appraisal of her career so far. That was published in 1924. And the Dial had also published a short story called Mrs. Dalloway in Bond street, which was sort of the beginning of what became the novel Mrs. Dalloway. So she was getting a reputation in the US as well. And there were some negative reviews, again, basically on the theme that the characters don't add up to anything, that these aren't real people, that, you know, it's difficult to tell what's going on. But I would say by the time Dalloway came out, more people were beginning to understand what she was doing. And there was a, of course, a broader context, too, because poetry was changing. Joyce was publishing Ulysses, although it wasn't widely available. It was, you know, cognoscenti knew how to find it. It was being written about. And it's not a transformation that's limited to literature. I mean, the whole aesthetic world was in sort of an upheaval in the early part of the 20th century in visual art and poetry and music. And there was a sea change of what people were expecting of art. And it. I would say the basic answer is that it, Mrs. Alloway was received as a. An important novel by a novelist who was making waves at the time.

[A]

Okay. And I mean, we think of it now as a. As a classic. Has its ascent been linear or has it gone through some. Some ups and downs over the years in terms of critical appraisal of it?

[B]

Well, I think it's gone through ups and downs in the sense that her own Reputation has also, and I think particularly in the post Second World War period, and there was a kind of a backlash against Bloomsbury in general. The novel, I wouldn't say has particularly fallen out of view, but there is an emphasis in a lot of the criticism over the years of Clarissa being a kind of rather superficial character to hang a novel on, that she is, you know, she's just this high society lady of not much interest because of her class pretensions and so on. But I think that has changed in the last 10 or 20 years, where there is a recognition that during this day of the novel, Clarissa is actually examining her life and there's more depth to her than maybe critics have allowed for. But I think it's a novel that has had remarkable persistence. And in a way, I'm still not quite sure why. Mrs. Dalloway, of all her works, is the one that seems to have inspired so many other artists and produced so many other works in various fields, but particularly in fiction. So it's a very generative novel. The question of reputation is it sort of depends where you look. In some segments, society Woolf has always been held in high regard, and in others, as she is still, she's sort of dismissed as a snobbish writer working on a very small patch of ground of limited interest. So it's a novel that I think is regarded as probably among. You know, that to the Lighthouse are probably her most prominent works of fiction and probably the best known of her two. I think Clarissa's probably her best known character.

[A]

Yeah. Do you have any theories for why it's been so important or influential?

[B]

I think there's something manageable, in a sense, about a novel that takes place in a single day. I mean, certainly not the only one, that it is a. A very close examination of her life that is graspable. It's a day that begins with her going out to choose flowers for her party. What she says she's gonna buy them herself and ends with the party. So it has an arc which is quite assimilable. And it's a novel that examines the psychological aspects of its characters in such depth. And I think that it's got this sort of mystery of what is this connection between Septimus and Clarissa. And it's interesting that Woolf had this habit of getting proofs for her American publisher and her English publisher, which was her own Hogarth Press, and correcting them slightly differently. So she made a change in the American proofs, where near the end of the novel, when Clarissa is told by Lady Bradshaw that they were late because of a young man, a very sad case had thrown himself out of a window. And Clarissa withdraws to a little room on her own and contemplates this young man's death. And in the American edition, there is this line, he made her feel the beauty, made her feel the fun. And that was not in the English edition. So English and American readers for quite a long time read different books, essentially. And why this woman would have these quite strong feelings about the death of a young man who has absolutely nothing to do with her is intriguing. And this is, I guess, partly how I'm trying to answer that question of what it is that has attracted attention to Dalloway. But it's a novel in which Clarissa, for example, thinks about how we are affected by all kinds of people and places, even people we've never met, like people we pass on the street. They're all part of this complex that makes us who we are, even if we're not aware of it. And all through the novel, there have been these odd links between Septimus and Clarissa. One probably the most clear example of that is that as she's walking to the flower shop, Clarissa pauses in front of a famous bookshop window, Hatchard's in Piccadilly, and sees a copy of Shakespeare's play Cymbeline lying open in the window. And she reads the words fear no more the heat of the sun, which is a line from a funeral dirge in Cymbeline. In a scene where Septimus is focused on those words play in his mind. Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter's rages. So we think, oh, they're both. And we know that Septimus was in love with his English teacher and went off to save an England that was represented for him by Shakespeare's plays. So there's this link. But there are also many other echoes that make a kind of invisible connection between Septimus and Clarissa. She's been thinking throughout the day back on the choices that she's made. And at the end of the day, when she hears about this young man's death, she wonders to herself. She says, did he plunge holding his treasure? And she thinks to herself, there is something, something there is that matters. And she thinks how that has been obscured in her own life. So she's having, I think, a sort of a moment of empathy and recognizing that this young man, which we know as readers, he makes this choice to end his life because he feels that he's going to be shut away by this society that can't deal with his. They don't want to think about the war anymore. It's five years since it ended and he's babbling in the streets. And Sir William Bradshaw, the great doctor on Harley street, says, you know, really be better if we just put him away in one of my homes, because sometimes it's better to just remove these people. And he finds Septimus a rather distasteful young fellow. So this is part of her criticism of the social system that this society is trying to paper over the losses of the war and to just get on with this glittering June society life. And Clarissa maybe has a moment of recognition at the end. Now, I don't know if that's a very generally held view now, but it's certainly one that people have written about that Clarissa recognizes in Septimus a kind of integrity that she recognizes that she has not honored in her own life. So this goes back to what Woolf said modern fiction should do is ask questions rather than provide answers. She was very influenced by the Russian writers who are being translated from about 1910 on. And in her essay Modern Fiction, she writes about Russian novelists and she cites a short story called Gusev by Chekhov. And she talks about how it's the story that seems to have no conclusion. It just the questions it raises just echo on sort of forever. And I think that's both what, you know, for someone like me, that's what I love about writers like Woolf. For other readers, it's really frustrating. There's a lovely letter from an American reader that I quote in the book where Woolf kept some of her fan mail. And there's a woman who writes in the 1930s to Woolf and says how she loves her novels. And Mrs. Dalloway is very special to her and she uses it as a kind of test of character when she meets new people and she says she loans them. Mrs. Dalloway. And basically what she says, if they get it, if they like it, then she knows they're going to get on. She says, I gave it to my brother in law and he understood it and liked it. So I had a sense that, you know, this was going to be an okay relationship. And I think it's something that is very much what Wolf writes about in many of her essays is that reading fiction is a kind of collaboration between the writer and the reader. And maybe going back to the question of why Mrs. Dalloway has had this hold on people's imaginations for so long is that it does invite you to the party in a sense, it's a very different experience to read a novel like Mrs. Dalloway than to read a novel by Dickens or George Eliot, where you certainly have to work, but you are being guided and directed. Woolf writes in modern fiction. She says writers like young Mr. Joyce, and she mentions Lytton Strachey, her friend who's a biographer. She says, what they've done is they've taken away the guideposts, so we can't look to the sort of authoritative narrative voice to tell us what to think or where to look. And I think that's what frustrates some readers, like the character I mentioned earlier, Maisie Johnson. She just appears for a couple of sentences and then that's it. But you don't know that until you finish. You know, you think, is she going to come back? Is she going to be at the party? Is she going to somehow be significant? But she's just someone in a park for a moment. One of the things I think maintains the novel, Mrs. Dalloway's hold on the reader's imagination is that you can read it again and again, and it's like turning a crystal in the light. It will catch different glints each time. Because, you know, we change, too.

[A]

And I wonder if part of the reason why it's become so influential is. Is because of what it doesn't have and because it does focus on just this single day, which is kind of revolving around planning for and having this party. So many other books would have it be the day the woman decided to leave her husband or. Or the day that she had an argument with her mother for the final time, or a kind of event. It does have the profundity of Septimus that that brings in. But it also is kind of encouraging us to look at days. You know, most of us don't have a seismic event every single day. Our lives are filled with days where we have, you know, ordinary tasks going on. But that doesn't mean that they can't be extraordinary days in our interior life.

[B]

Oh, exactly. And I think that. Yeah, that's exactly Wolf's point is that take any ordinary. I mean, this is, again, a very famous passage in her essay Modern Fiction. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. She says, take any moment and it is filled with sensation. And that's exactly what happens right on the first page of Mrs. Dalloway, because she steps out of her house, and as she steps out, she's thinking about her party, and one of the things that's happening in her house is they're Taking the doors off the hinges because they're making more room for people to move. And that word hinge, remind, it's. We can almost feel it suddenly opens a memory. And she thinks, oh, I remember that sound of how the door in my childhood home at Borton, or the hinge into the. Of the French doors leading out into the garden squeaked. So that word, she thinks, oh, the doors would be taken off their hinges and then we're suddenly back in when she was 18. So that that word hinge has become a way. It's almost like a hinge itself. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a great example of what you were just saying, is that any ordinary moment, she's just decided, I'm going to go out on this lovely June morning, that moment is suffused with her memories because that's who she is. So on that single page, we are as readers, we are immersed in the consciousness of this woman of 52, simultaneously with the 18 year old version of her. And to do that, I think, is, you know, it's an example of Woolf's skill because it's so subtle. And then all of a sudden we're in another one of those moments where a neighbor with a very odd name, Scrope Purvis, we suddenly see Clarissa from his point of view. He doesn't really know her, but the narrative says he knows her as one does when you just someone who lives on the same street, you just nod hello, he observes her and then they cross the road and we never see him again. So there's this sort of movement back and forth in time and also from different perspectives. So that, as you said, it's a single day, but it's a day that is a day that could only happen as the culmination of all the other days that have come before it. And that's what I think she's trying to get at, is that ordinary life is extraordinary. She does write about this also. In a Room of One's own, she says was bad at remembering the exact quotations, but basically in a room of one's own in modern fiction, she's getting across the point that life doesn't happen always in big moments. It's also there in the small, ordinary moments of every day. And that's something that she said that she found very difficult to convey, what she called the cotton wool of everyday life, but that what she found frustrating about the previous generation of novelists is that they were so focused on, you know, the, the getting from tea to dinner, what she called the formal railway line of sentence, like just telling us all these facts, that's not really giving us a sense of who these people are. So. And we get a strong sense of who Clarissa is. Right. In the first couple of paragraphs.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because she's thinking back to a time in her life that was a turning point, another hinge.

[A]

It invites us in and then it continues to deliver that, and we see it deepen and expand and ultimately come to a kind of conclusion. The book is called Mrs. A Biography. Mark Hussey, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[B]

Oh, thanks very much for having me.

[A]

That was Marc Hussey. Please note that I referred to the book title as Mrs. A Biography, but it's actually Mrs. Dalloway biography of a Novel. My apologies to Mark for that. And finally today, I owe you one more Franchesca Wade recommendation. The Long Term Project, she says, and this one is for hardcore Wolf fans and literary deep dive aficionados. Observe, Perpetually reads one of Wolf's last diary entries, quoting Henry James. Woolf was always fascinated by people, and her diaries are full of piercing insights into herself and others. Woolf loved reading diaries and her own lurk somewhere between private and public writing. Woolf's diary was where she recorded Bloomsbury's debates, parties and conversations, unleashed critiques of her friends, charted memories, practiced description, analyzed her own flaws, and battled with the struggle of writing she wrote in her diary to soothe the whirlpools in her mind. Entries are by turns introspective and expansive, personal and political. There are six volumes covering, with some gaps and elisions, the years 1897 to 1941. They are worth reading slowly, in full and savoring. End quote. Excellent advice for someone looking for, what was it? Thoroughness. Let's see. The Long Term Project. If you're looking for the Long Term Project, that is excellent advice. And now, apropos of nothing at all, let's hear my last book with Graham Watson, who was here to discuss the Invention of Charlotte Bronte. Will he choose a book by the Brontes for his last book? Let's find out. Okay. Joining me now is Graham Watson, the author of the Invention of Charlotte Bronte. Graham, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[C]

This is a very difficult question for a voracious reader like me because I'd like to imagine all of the future classics that are about to appear. But there's a book that I've been reading since I was about 16. Actually, I discovered this book. It's not by the Brontes or any of the other great literary figures in the 19th century. It's Virginia Woolf's Diary. She's, of course, one of the great leading lights of the 20th century modernist movement. But the Diary of Virginia Woolf is one of the least well known works by her. We all might know the waves or Mrs. Dalloway, certainly to the Lighthouse. But the Diary of Virginia Woolf, I think, is one of the great masterpieces from her pen. It's full of love, light and color. It's full of changing moods and sensations. It's beautiful. It brings continual joy to anyone who reads it. It's published in five volumes, but you can get a single volume edition called A Moment's Liberty. I would advise any reader who wants to submerge themselves in the perspective of someone else to read this book. It's wonderful. And it also maps Virginia Woolf's struggle with mental illness. She was determined to record every step of her depressions. She was someone who suffered from nervous breakdowns and depressions all of her life, from the age of 13 until her eventual death by suicide. She maps and records the development of depressions and how she overcomes them. Very interesting perspective in today's world of resilience that ultimately, unfortunately, ended in tragedy. But she has her moments of triumph where she does rise above her depressions and decide to live on and live well. So I think from that book, the Diary of Virginia Woolf, I'd like that to be my last glimpse of literature.

[A]

Right. And for fans of the history of literature, as hopefully our listeners all are, she also is such a great reader and such a great critic and publisher. And she writes about that too. Right. I've read excerpts where she'll be. It's almost like her essays, but you're getting kind of the essays she wrote, you're getting her initial responses to the works, and she's excited when she discovers a new author or when she is wrestling with someone who she knows is supposed to be great, but she. She has her doubts. Or it's a great diary of a reader as well as a writer in person.

[C]

That's a very good point. Absolutely. She's on the front line of reception when it comes to those writers of the early 20th century who'd become canonical. James Joyce, T.S. eliot, Kathryn Mansfield. She was reading them all first. She and her husband Leonard ran the Hogarth Press, so they were. They had an extraordinary eye for talent. They were among the. I think they were the very first translators into English of Sigmund Freud's work as well. So hugely influential. The first publishers of T.S. eliot's the Wasteland. Famously, they rejected James Joyce's Ulysses. Virginia Woolf wasn't convinced that it was the great work that many people felt. However, she did champion people like Katherine Mansfield, who I think is also an extraordinary writer. But, yeah, you're right, she. She's enlivened by other books, but other voices.

[A]

Yeah, she.

[C]

She spent her whole life surrounded by books. She understood the transformative power of books and the written work.

[A]

And then she also. She wrestles with or is absorbed by the impact of the Russian novelists that were coming out in translation. And she's also digging back into the past of English literature to find other women authors. And some she likes, some she doesn't. But you're really getting, you know, this kind of unfiltered view of literature and how important it was to her.

[C]

Absolutely. In terms of her reflecting on the past of English literature and trying to find those female voices, this was something that was incredibly important to her because she felt that the further back into the past we looked, the fewer female voices there were. This is something that's debated in now as to whether she was correct about that, because she. There were female voices, possibly more than she was aware of, because she was, of course, only. She only had the resources that were available to her at that time, which were printed sources. Now, as digitization happens, we are discovering that there were others that she wasn't aware of. However, her point does stand, that there were, as we proceed back to the past, that there isn't a female Chaucer, there isn't a female Shakespeare. Her example of Shakespeare's sister is very well known, that in a female body, Shakespeare's talents wouldn't have been recognized. I think that point remains. But she was interested in the anonymous voices, those who were excluded from the canon, who wasn't there. This was what she pursued. And towards the end of her life, she was contemplating a book called Anon, short for Anonymous, because she felt that the history of English literature was filled with anonymous voices. And she wondered whether these anonymous voices were women, that their voices had been erased from the canon and the men's had been celebrated. We don't have that book from her. She died before she could write it. But it's certainly something that did prey on her mind. The unseen lives, the unknown voices that have disappeared and have been excluded. We can see that concern running through her diaries as well. She was absolutely, passionately interested in the details of other people's lives. And there are anecdotes from those who'd known her and loved her about how whenever they met her, she would interrogate them about what they were doing, what were they wearing, where were they going, why were they going to buy a pencil somewhere and what kind of sun woke them up in the morning. And they would feel exhausted by the end of this. But it was an example of how full of passion she was for the minutiae of the hidden what was concealed from everyone. She wanted to bring that out and say, it's also valuable, it's also relevant and we should celebrate it, too.

[A]

And what a nice way to go out to think of our own lives as being something worth celebrating, even if we maybe never made it into the. Into the household name status of a Virginia Wolf.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

Okay. That's a wonderful selection. Graham Watson, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[C]

Thank you very much indeed.

[A]

Okay, there we go. Last book for the ages. It sounded like Hope. Graham's.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Sounded like a siren was coming in right there at the end. Okay. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, recommended by two very good sources. My thanks to Graham Watson and of course to Mark Hussey for joining me today. We will be back soon with a look at Johannes Gutenberg, the little man who started this whole big literature thing. Sort of. Or did he? And has he been accurately portrayed throughout the years? Maybe, maybe not. We'll find out. And we have Mel Brooks and other eminent Jews. We have a scary story for Halloween. We have Edgar Allan Poe. We have Love, Sex and Frankenstein. We have fairy tales. A very, very bad poet from Russia, legendarily bad. We have Ernest Hemingway and more. Please do join us for those episodes and while you're waiting, you can check out the History of Literature podcast tour. The signups are open through the end of this month, September 2025. That's at John Shore's Travel Shores without an E or at History of Literature. And our new low ad version of the podcast is available to you patrons who sign [e-mail] Literature I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Rick Rubeck. And I'm Royce Yudkoff. Welcome to our chart topping podcast from the Harvard Business School. Think big, buy small. This series lets you in on a special way to become an entrepreneur. How to buy your own business, be your own boss and get the financial.

[B]

Benefits of your efforts.

[A]

Entrepreneurship through acquisition involves searching for an existing, enduringly profitable smaller business and buying it, usually from a retiring founder back for a brand new season. Our conversations are with guests from all backgrounds and different stages of the entrepreneurship through Acquisition journey, from those considering whether this path is right for them all.

[B]

The way through to those who have sold the businesses they bought as searchers.

[A]

And then ran as CEOs. Thousands of smaller firms are sold every year, and many people have successfully acquired an existing business that is enduringly profitable.

[B]

So why not you too?

[A]

We've been helping students understand this less traveled path to personal and professional independence.

[B]

And our courses at the Harvard Business school for nearly 15 years.

[A]

But you don't have to attend the Harvard Business School to take advantage of these opportunities. The goal of the Think Big Buy Small podcast is to help you, our.

[B]

Listeners, decide if entrepreneurship through Acquisition is.

[A]

For you and if it is, to help you take your first steps on.

[B]

The journey to buying your own business. Follow Think Big Buy Small wherever you are. Get your podcasts.

[A]

It'S hard to remember now, but the Internet used to be fun. I can't believe how easy it is.

[B]

To surf the Net.

[A]

Surf's up On Long Shadow Breaking the Internet, we'll trace how a tool that once fueled democracy, opposition activists organized the march on Facebook became a weapon aimed at the very heart of it. You're watching the unraveling of our democracy right now from Long Lead and prx. This is Long Shadow Breaking the Internet. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.