‘Mrs Dalloway’ at 100: Virginia Woolf’s timeless novel is a work of pandemic fiction

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, set on a June day in 1923, is unusual in that its two protagonists – society hostess Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith – never meet.

Published 100 years ago on May 14 1925, the novel follows Clarissa as she prepares to host a party. She is visited by a former suitor, Peter Walsh, who has just returned from India. Her movements on London’s streets are intertwined with those of her husband, Richard, and daughter, Elizabeth, as well as a host of minor characters.

Simultaneously, Septimus is experiencing what we would now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by his service in the First World War. His sense of London as an apocalyptic war zone is exacerbated by his treatment at the hands of his doctors and their refusal to “hear” his trauma.

Going about her day

Mrs Dalloway has inspired and continues to inspire numerous creative responses and reworkings, such as Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998) and Wayne McGregor’s triptych ballet Woolf Works (2015). The novel now has its own biography by Mark Hussey due to be published next month and DallowayDay celebrations that echo James Joyce’s Bloomsday.

A century on, Mrs Dalloway speaks in so many ways to our own moment of militarisation, neo-imperialism and political crisis. In her diary, Woolf wrote that...

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