What a glorious exploration of VW and Mrs Dalloway. It’s so long since I read it and yet this brought it back so vividly. Makes me long for a re-read and to dive back into A Writer’s Diary. I may have to do that this weekend! Oh, and I have sneaking suspicion you’re absolutely right about Joyce.
Love this, Katy. It captures the wild lucidity of Mrs Dalloway brilliantly. On a more superficial level, Mrs D is a masterful (ethnographic) portrait of Edwardian society; but, for me, it's so much more than that. Woolf writes so intensely poetically, and I love how she flips between Clarissa's and Septimus's contrasting realities. Clarissa's openness and joy ('What a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach...What a lark! What a plunge!') v Septimus's trauma ('the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames'). And I can't help thinking that Septimus is the most autobiographic character in the whole novel. Or, at least, that he expresses a core aspect of VW's personality. Which is so interesting because he's a traumatised man who has been emasculated by PTSD and the brutality of war. I think Woolf identified with Septimus on so many different levels, and partly because she felt like the society she was born into had crushed her sense of herself (e.g. her 'masculinity'), that it denied her the right to fully express who she was. Such a great book. And thanks again for your post. Loved it. ✨️
Thanks for this. I love Mrs Dalloway and you’ve reminded me why!
What a glorious exploration of VW and Mrs Dalloway. It’s so long since I read it and yet this brought it back so vividly. Makes me long for a re-read and to dive back into A Writer’s Diary. I may have to do that this weekend! Oh, and I have sneaking suspicion you’re absolutely right about Joyce.
Love this, Katy. It captures the wild lucidity of Mrs Dalloway brilliantly. On a more superficial level, Mrs D is a masterful (ethnographic) portrait of Edwardian society; but, for me, it's so much more than that. Woolf writes so intensely poetically, and I love how she flips between Clarissa's and Septimus's contrasting realities. Clarissa's openness and joy ('What a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach...What a lark! What a plunge!') v Septimus's trauma ('the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames'). And I can't help thinking that Septimus is the most autobiographic character in the whole novel. Or, at least, that he expresses a core aspect of VW's personality. Which is so interesting because he's a traumatised man who has been emasculated by PTSD and the brutality of war. I think Woolf identified with Septimus on so many different levels, and partly because she felt like the society she was born into had crushed her sense of herself (e.g. her 'masculinity'), that it denied her the right to fully express who she was. Such a great book. And thanks again for your post. Loved it. ✨️
A great piece, thank you. Mrs Dalloway is one of the few books I re-read.