15. Mrs Dalloway: Woolf, Sexuality, and Change

What does Mrs Dalloway express about female sexuality and experience? Why did its modernist style cause such controversy? And, what was Virginia Woolf really like? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Mrs Dalloway, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:38Speaker 02

  Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges. Rumpelmayor'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 you could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Borton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this, of course. The air was... 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,

• 2:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Musing among the vegetables?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Was that it?

• 2:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  I prefer men to cauliflowers.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  So that was the opening of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 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 nineteen twenty three. 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 could be her maid Lucy.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  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. 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, a young World War One veteran called Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Lucrezia. And Septimus is suffering from shell shock.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  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?

• 4:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a good question, Tabby. Hi, everybody. I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of three books published in the 1920s. 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 have to have to puzzle out exactly what's going on. But that's part of the fun of it.

• 5:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Virginia Woolf, when she wrote it, she definitely thought she was doing something new with it. So she had written 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 1910, 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.

• 6:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so in Mrs. Dalloway, you have a, 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 writing about it is something that's often defined by academics using a word that actually our executive producer, Tony Pastner, said we were banned from using.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I know. We swore when we started doing this show that we would never use this word.

• 6:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  We would never use this word. This word is modernism. And Tony always says, you mention 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 going to 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?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  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 Jane Austen later and how this slightly plays into Jane Austen. But I loved like the elegance of the world.

• 7:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the twenties world.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. This time rereading it, I loved it. I was so moved by it. It's so perfectly balanced and full of feeling and it evokes like genuine melancholy when you read it. And this recognisable feeling of longing for a past that you never experienced and you didn't know, but you can pin it on to 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.

• 8:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree completely.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  What about you? Because I know, obviously, working with you on The Rest Is History, you famously are not a big fan of Virginia Woolf.

• 8:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Famously, yeah. People talk of nothing else.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. The great talking point of the 21st century.

• 8:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So if there are people who listen to this, who also listen to The Rest Is 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 Woolf personally, we'll probably come on to this, but I think this is one of the most perfect novels in the English language. I absolutely love it. I think it is 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,

• 9:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  a feeling of sadness at all you've lost, the loss of your youth, the loss of like past loves. Stuff like that, the disappointments of life. I think

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  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?

• 9:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Virginia Woolf writes this book in the early nineteen twenties, so roughly, let's say between nineteen twenty two and nineteen twenty four. 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. 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.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Extraordinary.

• 9:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  So David Lloyd George, Bon Iler, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay 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.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  You love Stanley Baldwin.

• 10:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Stanley Baldwin, who is the greatest of all Englishmen.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 10:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is described at the he at the party, he's not named, but he's described as looking so ordinary, really ordinary. And this is foolish from Virginia Woolf, because actually this was, well, Baldwin did look very ordinary, but this was his superpower. This was 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 nineteen eighteen. 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.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  The fashions have changed as well. I love that part of it.

• 10:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, and the sense of change, the characters in the book are consciously living through an age of change. So they are discussing the the state of the British Empire, which is now at its territorial peak, but is slightly rickety. 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.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Virginia Woolf actually 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 innovative writing style.

• 11:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So in literature, this is an age of great transition. So up to this point, there had been this kind of generation of male novelists. So absolutely Titanic figures like Joseph Conrad or Thomas Hardy.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  The Edwardians.

• 12:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Edwardians.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  That title alone perfectly kind of summons up what they were, certainly to people like Virginia Woolf.

• 12:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  But it's not that different in time, right? It's only the day before yesterday.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we'll get on to this, there is a particular kind of novelist, so H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy. 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. Eliot.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  The poet. He had published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915, which is actually about a party, and then The Wasteland in December 1922, I believe, your favourite poem, Tabby.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  I actually love The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as well, but yeah, The Wasteland is my favourite poem.

• 12:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree with you, by the way, amazing poems. And then James Joyce, with whom she had, shall we say, a slightly complicated...

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, a complicated relationship.

• 13:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  He had published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and then Ulysses in February 1922. 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?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  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 literary 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?

• 14:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Nicole Kidman played her. I love that movie. But then obviously, far more importantly, I played her. In my, in my GCSE monologue, I pretended to be Virginia Woolf. 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.

• 14:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  A bit later on, yeah.

• 14:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  You had, you had been in the River Ouse.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  I'd been in the River Ouse, yeah, emotionally and physically.

• 14:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Did you write the monologue?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  This would be tremendous bonus content for the listeners.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Those examiners walked out changed. They, they saw something, a fresh, young talent.

• 14:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Something they'll never forget.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Somehow I ended up here. We just had the Oscars and I'm here doing this.

• 14:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  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. But I can see that a bit like Emily Bronte, she sometimes is used in a way that slightly insists upon itself for people.

• 15:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's true. I think there's a particular kind of male critic, probably in which I slightly include myself.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who bridles Virginia Woolf. So my great hero, John, the critic John Carey, wrote a book called The Intellectuals and the Masses, which he basically took, 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.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, a sort of snob and all of this kind of thing, you know, sneering at ordinary people, blah, blah, blah. We'll unpack some of that because obviously the reality is a little bit more nuanced. So tell us about Virginia Woolf growing up and all that stuff.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  So she's born Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 and she's the daughter of 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 being do-gooders. And they produced 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 Godrevy Lighthouse. And so she writes that into To the Lighthouse, her other very famous novel.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And the sea is always a big part, and actually water is always a big part of Virginia Woolf's writing. And then a very telling remark in the Oxford Dictionary 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 later in her diary that "writing absorbed her, that ever since I was a little creature scribbling a story in the manor of Hawthorn, 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, little diary

• 17:17Speaker 02

  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 literary. 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.

• 17:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you're not wrong. But something, there is a darkness, isn't there? So basically, that, that the darkness grows and grows from the time, point when she's what, about six? And there is a very, very dark side to her life.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  There's a series of just tragedies that basically unravel her whole life. So the chief, 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. 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 13 and she's shattered by this. In the 1940s, she described herself at that time as being a newborn 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.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  More physical abuse from Gerald Duckworth follows, you know, 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.

• 19:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And then her father dies in 1904, doesn't he? Which is a massive, she'd been close to her father, she'd kind of idolized him to some extent, you know, he'd been her tutor. And this is another massive blow, another breakdown.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  That's her stability gone.

• 19:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And she does try to kill herself this time, doesn't she? Throws herself out of the window, I think.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, she does.

• 19:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, literally, 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 writer who incorporates it into her books. I mean, it becomes a great wellspring for her, but at the same time, it makes her life a complete misery.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  I mean, this is a huge part of Mrs. Dalloway. She channels all of that into, into the character, Septimus Warren Smith, as we will see.

• 19:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  And yeah, as you say, she's, she's, she's deeply traumatized by all these things that happened to her as a child. She never really 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?

• 20:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, society is this kind of com- competent, complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its 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 clever, independent woman,

• 20:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. Maybe it's partly genetic. Her, her mother was very melancholic, her father was very depressive. But this sort of, the sort of the irony of this, the tragic irony, is that, that the mental instability and the, and the, the, the mental health issues that she has undoubtedly inspire the works and, 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.

• 21:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  They come as much from her own experience as they do from the kind of wider culture or anything like that.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, and it's, as you say, a massive part of her genius. But the other interesting thing is, 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 nineteen hundreds, she's moved to Bloomsbury with her siblings, so Vanessa, Vanessa Bell later, and Toby and Adrian.

• 22:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  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 Cambridge. So these are all quite famous, recognizable names. So there's Litten Strachey.

• 22:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yep.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  There's the art critic Clive Bell, then there's the artist Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, and of course, the novelist Ian Forster. So that's famously, you know, passage to India, room with a view. And the economist John Maynard Keynes. We refer to them now as the Bloomsbury Group.

• 22:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they are very posh.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  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 a little bit self important, maybe a little bit self importantly, like into the arts, you know, they're do gooders. And yet alongside all this, they get out two kind of outrageous, very cancelable, chinny japes on the side.

• 23:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Dreadnought Hoax in 1910, so they do a bit of a Justin Trudeau tabby. They apply boot polish to their faces. And then they blag their way onto this boat, which was this sort of the absolute pride and joy of the Royal Navy, pretending to be Abyssinian visitors. And this was a great furore in the press. They, whenever people asked them questions, they just muttered bunga bunga under their breaths, which people thought was Abyssinian. And that's the origin of Sylvia Boerseghana's bunga bunga sex parties. That's where the phrase bunga bunga comes from. But anyway, she marries one of these Bloomsbury Group people, Leonard Wolf, 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.

• 23:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  No, certainly not for this time as well.

• 24:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Leonard Wolf is Jewish and she often, I mean, she describes him in pretty scathing terms. She says he's a penniless Jew, she calls him. And she says to him, basically, I'm not attracted to you in the slightest. And, and actually, they get married anyway. He gives her a bit of grief about her, what he sees as her sexual fragility.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  But they were still a loving and very devoted couple, you know, the, the marriage worked as it were.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the other thing, Tabby, is her sexuality, isn't it? Because basically now it's generally believed that Virginia Woolf was a lesbian, right?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  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 lasted between 1925 and 1935, so a long time. But there were other women as well, other society characters. For instance, Sybil Colfax, Lady Ottoline Morell and Mrs. Dalloway's. I mean, we'll get on to this more later, but Mrs. Dalloway's recollections of her friend, her girlhood friend Sally Seton. I mean, they're full of kind of, you know, lesbian ardour. So I think, I think, I think she, yeah, she probably was.

• 25:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you can understand why a lot of people see Virginia Woolf as a heroine, can't you? As a, as a role model, almost.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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.

• 26:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of antisemitism, which is mad from somebody married to a Jewish guy. How I hated marrying a Jew, how I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewellery 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, the thing that actually I find so dislikeable about her is her snobbish contempt for other writers from more humble backgrounds. 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 is a guy called Arnold Bennett. Not terribly fashionable now, to be honest. He was born in Stoke-on-Trent.

• 27:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  He wrote these very realist books, sort of slightly old fashioned books about ordinary people in the potteries in Stoke-on-Trent and thereabouts. The best one, I think, is The Old Wife's 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 writer, you know, by today's standards, he would be 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 Woolf wrote this essay about him, 1924, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

• 27:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she says, basically, people like Arnold Bennett are rubbish. They're old hat, 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 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 and sort of sneered at them and acted as though their books were just superficial and shallow, which they're definitely not. I think that, I think she was grossly unfair to them.

• 28:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  I mean, I get that. I think she is harsh on kind of those. Writers like that, you know, saying that she that she managed, I mean, to find something that they'd always liked. But I do think, I do think Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is like, I don't think it's about where Arnold Bennett comes from or anything. 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 1910.

• 29:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, she's invented the criteria. I mean, she's basically said, oh, everything's different since 1910. Therefore, if you're writing in the old style, you're rubbish. I mean, I think that's, I mean, that's, that's just become circular. She's just basically saying, if you don't like, like me, then you're no good. And I don't think that's right.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  No, I don't think that's right 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.

• 29:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's, that's, that's definitely true.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  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 of them and then fails at what she sets out to do. That would be reprehensible, but she does succeed.

• 29:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 writer, A, a writer like Joyce, but B, a self-taught working man. That's hard to justify, I would say.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  It definitely is. And also because 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, 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 improves a bit. And she and Leonard, they live in Hogarth House in Richmond, and that's

• 31:32Speaker 02

  where they set up the Hogarth Press. And it's, they handprint these gorgeous books, and they publish the likes of T. S. Eliot, Catherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, et cetera. 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 practically no plot in that at all. It's

• 32:13Speaker 02

  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 1921 says, "For 60 days, and those days..." What a gap! "For 60 days, and those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping drawers, et cetera, et cetera, sedatives, plunging back into bed again." So you can see, she's very, very unwell. And she calls these resurgence of depression, she calls it a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well, and nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

• 32:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 and Bond Street, which is about Mrs. Dalloway going off to buy some gloves, isn't it? And then she's got the idea for a second story about the prime minister who's driving through London going to Mrs Dalloway's party. And she basically gets the idea that she can

• 33:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, A Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey, which I greatly recommend. Anyway, that's by the by. Then in August 1923, she says, I've had my big discovery. 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.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  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 Cubist paintings, so the chime of Big Ben, the clock, is like a grid. And this is provides a structure for

• 34:52Speaker 02

  the book and order. And then kind of beneath this is this kind of apparent, random flow of impressions. And then there's also the way that Cubist 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 write till the very end, till the final chapters, she's kind of experimenting with it. Anyway, she finally finishes Mrs Dalloway 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.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  But how was Mrs. Dalloway received? Because obviously at this time, it's very unusual in its kind of style and form.

• 35:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think a lot of reviews just said it's, 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, I don't really get it. So even somebody like D H Lawrence, he said, 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 is a lovely expression.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  I don't actually know what that means.

• 36:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I like it. It's sort of meaningless, but it's powerful.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's very Mrs. Dalloway.

• 36:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is very Mrs. Dalloway. It's one of a 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 has that tremendous appeal to the general public, because most people want a story.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but I think, because we're often in this show, we've done a lot of books that are trailblazing in one way or another. So actually, even The Woman in White, you know, which now, I mean, it's a book that Virginia Woolf 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

• 37:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  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, on the 28th of March, 1941, 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.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  So then she walked into the river Ouse, weighed down with stones in her pockets and she drowned herself. And her body wasn't found for days.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  And then following her death, her reputation kind of declined till the nineteen sixties. And then suddenly it revived and Lyndle Gordon sees three things as crucial to this revival. First is her 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.

• 38:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, I know exactly what you mean. She basically becomes.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  A bit like Sylvia Plath, maybe.

• 38:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, like Sylvia Plath, exactly. The sort of, I don't want to denigrate this at all.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  No, I don't, I don't either.

• 38:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't want to sound like I'm sneering at it.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  I can understand, I do totally understand why she means so much to people, you know. It's always kind of encouraging and 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.

• 39:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Yeah. So it's understandable. And in the age of university expansion, 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, Lyndle Gordon, her excellent biography, says of Virginia Woolf, that if you narrow her down to just a sort of somebody who is a victim, you know, suffering from sexism or suffering with her mental health 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 traumas of her life and exploits it, mines the traumas

• 39:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  for great art and actually overcomes them through, 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.

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• 40:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back to the book club, everybody. We're talking about Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe. We talked about Mrs. Wolfe. Let's talk about Mrs. Dalloway. So Tabby, let's start with, when you first read the book, what strikes you, I think, is about the style? And what is it that you think is so innovative about the style?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  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 characters' internal thoughts. And right from the outset, that very, very famous first line, you know, Mrs. Dalloway said she'd buy the flowers herself. Even then, you don't realise 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 path of this plane. But 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.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  And there's this kind of series of vignettes 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.

• 42:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so it's a particular style, which academics call free indirect discourse. So in other words, it's not like first person, it's like, it's not I did this, I did that. It's Mrs. Dalloway did this, Mrs. Dalloway did that.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  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

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Totally it is.

• 42:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  signposted, you know, she thought this, she said that. We know, 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 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's a nice example of the modernity of the book.

• 43:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because 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 it, 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, bodies, planes, cars, vans." This sort of cacophony of stuff that marks it out as a 1920s book,

• 44:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  because of obviously things like the plane and the car, in a way that you wouldn't have had in a book written in, let's say, the 1880s or the 1890s or something.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  No, definitely not. And you love the, speaking of the aeroplane, you love that, don't you, the way that she uses that. So 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 letters in the sky." So I mean, A, the kind of exclamation marks there, you get a sense that this is extraordinary, this is a new thing. So as you say, it roots you firm in the 1920s. It also carries you into people's different minds, the smoke almost, the way that they react to it.

• 44:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think the thing about the plane, I love the plane as a device. So the plane is writing these letters in the sky. Now, that's something that had been invented in August 1922, skywriting it was called. And it was used for, are you surprised at that?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  I'm surprised you knew the exact date, but I'm gratified.

• 45:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I read it in a book.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it was used for advertising. So the Daily Mail, actually, were pioneering this. They sent up a plane day after day.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Dominic Sandbrook's headlines dominating the sky.

• 45:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Corbyn's Maoist Britain, flashe'd across the skyline.

• 45:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  You always come back to that headline.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Well, it's your best.

• 45:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  There were so many good headlines. The reason you come back to that is because you were a massive Corbyn easter.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 45:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, as you know.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  No, I do.

• 45:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  As you know, and you're ashamed of it now.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 45:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so you're just massive projection from you.

• 45:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  The plane is up in the sky, the plane is writing something, but we never find out.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 defining features of Mrs. Dalloway. That nothing is fixed. 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.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 46:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  You have to kind of puzzle that out for yourself.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  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, was 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.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  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 kind of structural force in the novel, as we said in the first half, is time. Hence that title, the working title, The Hours. So time structures 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.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  And Big Ben kind of represents the official. Irrevocable passing of time, like it's it's it's much more masculine, it signifies state and kind of patriarchy. But then there's the chimes 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, you know, internalized experience of the passing of time. So that's almost Mrs. Dalloway's clock.

• 48:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you had that, you were talking in the first half about cubism and about cubist art and 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 the underpinnings of the book, I suppose. And so the bongs of 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. 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.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is very carefully ordered and disciplined and structured.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It definitely is.

• 49:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  So let's get to Mrs. Dalloway herself. So Mrs. Dalloway herself, I mean, she is, I mean, she is as a character, a really good example of Virginia Woolf's style, 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 you'll read a lot of 19th century books, and the character can be, you know, we mentioned the woman in white, right?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Hart, right? 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.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 function we have in life. And a character like Mrs. Dalloway captures that perfectly.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  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 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,

• 51:06Speaker 02

  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 characters' fantasies about their childhoods. So there's this rather stern, domineering woman called Lady Bruton. And then suddenly we kind of get 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 humanises her, gives her more than one dimension.

• 51:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is something that actually, you know, to go back to our old example about the Wilkie Holland's book, 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 the sense that the characters have Depths within them that they don't quite understand themselves.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  It's those caves that she was speaking about, the tunneling process.

• 52:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. And I think why that works really nicely is that Clarissa Dalloway is not necessarily a terribly clever or interesting person.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  She's very conventional. She's not very intellectual. She's bored by politics. She loves very kind of domestic feminine hobbies. She loves flowers. She loves her clothes.

• 52:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So Virginia Woolf 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.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 52:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Clarissa is still, I mean, she's a decent person, isn't she? All the characters, you know, people think sometimes that she's perhaps superficial and silly, but they don't doubt that she's a nice person.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think she's such, she's such a subtly wrought character because you get, like her friend Sally Seaton 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, oh, am I superficial? You know, have I kind of built my, my life around the wrong things?

• 53:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, she does. So one of the examples in which she has different kind of personalities, split personalities, that sometimes she's Clarissa.

• 54:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 the 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.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the Tory MP and he actually is a little bit less interesting than the other characters, don't you think?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  He definitely is. There's almost no chemistry between them. They have kind of this fond but chilly relationship. There's this one bit when he's leaving a lunch party and he suddenly thinks, you know, I'm going to go home and I'm going to 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 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 reflects, you know, two sides of life, a little bit like Edgar Linton in Heathcliff maybe, but just massively toned down.

• 55:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Because, you know, Richard is, you know, stable, a bit stolid, a bit dull.

• 55:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Peter is kind of unstable, wild, passionate. He's always bothering her. On the whole, Mrs. Dalloway is incredibly sexless character. And the implication, I think, is slightly that Peter Walsh kind of is bothering her, not sexually, you know, 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. Dalloway 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.

• 56:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 the massive state it, but in her childhood, in her teenage years, she used to go to this place called Borton, this country house. And it was at Borton 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's 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 Woolf takes that stuff from Jane Austen. She compresses that into her memory.

• 57:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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? And she's been ill and we know that she 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.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Great form. I, I admire that. I think that's great. I think that's what everyone wants to do before they go to bed at night.

• 57:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  In her narrow bed, she reads these books. And I think the implication is that there's more, there's, there's something behind this because I 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.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  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 we have from Mrs Dalloway, really. And she says she could not resist sometimes 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.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  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 crocus is an extraordinary line. It's very, very evocative. And this is, you know, she talks about how the moment that she kissed Sally Seton 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, 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, such a kind of passionate, untethered character. She, unlike Clarissa, is not repressed at all, not at all snobbish.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  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 19th century, early 20th century English fiction. I mean, 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, 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.

• 1:00:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Eliot or

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whoever. And actually, the Clarissa Sally relationship, this teenage kind of crush, I guess. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm, that sounds a bit dismissive. Let's call it a teenage romance.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Between these two young women. This is the moment when the book emotionally sings. When you, when you really feel it. And then when Sally actually appears in the book at the end, it makes the crushing disappointment for the reader all the more powerful, because actually Sally turns out, we'll come on to this. Sally turns out to be very conventional and very staid and to have become unbelievably boring. And this is, 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 imaginable.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  I bet you get a massive like surge of schadenfreude, though.

• 1:01:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tabby.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  I'm so much more interesting than them.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm a wit. Look at this guy.

• 1:01:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is that my voice?

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Dominic, I get it. I get it.

• 1:01:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I went to my friend's, my friend's wedding about 10 years ago and I met a bloke who, oh my God, I hope he doesn't listen to this podcast. I met this guy who had been such a laugh when we were teenagers and I had this 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.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:02:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I was just like, what went wrong? Oh my God.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  You were just hoping we'd swap some historical anecdotes. Anyway.

• 1:02:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't know what's going on with this impression.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  I don't know either.

• 1:02:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's already people on social media saying Tabby is very rude to Dominic. What are they gonna make of this?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  No, it's just factional banter.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  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 there are seven characters, basically. So we have Elizabeth, Elizabeth, who's Clarissa's daughter, she's 18, Lucrezia, Septimus's wife, she's 20, Miss Kilman in her 40s, Clarissa and Sally in their 50s, and then this Lady Bruton who's in her 60s. And through these seven characters, we can track kind of a woman's life cycle. 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 was actually a passage in the original draft of Mrs. Dalloway that quite obviously alluded to menopause and it was cut out because it was thought a little

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  bit crass. So it is also about, you know, the time that Virginia Woolf is writing this, she was in her 40s, she'd been told by doctors that she shouldn't have children. And so I think a lot of it's about the kind of melancholy brought on by menopause and particularly for women at this time, defined by their marriages and their role as mothers.

• 1:03:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Also something you can't talk about, Tabby, in the 1920s, you can't even admit that it's happening.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  No, no, doctors were very strict about it and kind of warned that it would make women mad almost. And so you can see that Mrs. Dalloway's massively internalised 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 rejected from a lunch party, when she's not invited, she says that she feels shriveled, aged, breathless. And then she, this really, really sad kind of meditation, she thinks, "Women must put off their rich apparel and midday they must disrobe narrower and narrower would be her bed."

• 1:04:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Growing into kind of grey, crystallised middle age.

• 1:04:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Clarissa is haunted throughout by these lines from Shakespeare's play, Cymbeline. "Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter's rages." And 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 she's full of regret and melancholy.

• 1:04:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 and you 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 regret and 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 everybody 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 India. He's constantly a kind of intruder. He was an intruder at Borton. He was kind of interrupting

• 1:05:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always a bit unclear. She's married, though, and she's much, much younger than him. So it's like he's trying to.

• 1:06:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sort out a divorce for her, isn't he?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, that he actually won't do it, I think.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  No, that he actually won't do it. And 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 and how he was crying, things like that. He really did adore her, but he also, he massively idealises this infatuation when they were young. But it did undoubtedly impact the rest of his life and his dealings with women, I think.

• 1:07:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and he's a slightly odd character in some ways. A sort of a weaker man than he appears to be. He's always playing with a knife.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  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? 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 Peter follows this woman 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.

• 1:08:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you have, we have Elizabeth, who is-

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Clarissa's daughter.

• 1:08:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Clarissa's daughter, who's often described as being like a hyacinth. So flowers run through the book. Go on, Tabby.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  But she is aware of this and she's kind of rolls her eyes at it. She sort of dreads the fact that people start comparing her to trees and flowers and stuff. Cause 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 eclairs. That tea scene's very unpleasant because Elizabeth is trying to extract herself from this, this massive ball.

• 1:08:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Miss Kilman's stuffing herself with eclairs.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  She keeps going on about how no one likes her whilst shoveling in more eclairs.

• 1:09:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So here again, if you're a Virginia Woolf phobe or a Woolf skeptic, Miss Kilman is, is sort of grist your mill. Because Miss Kilman is the middle-class character with her cheap macintosh, which Clarissa Dalloway despises. She's always stuffing herself with eclairs. She is shown as-

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  She moans a lot.

• 1:09:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, moany, greedy, nasty. She's described as ugly, all of this kind of thing. And actually, critics like John Carey or Claire Tomlin have said of Miss Kilman, this is Virginia Woolf's 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.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  In a way, I think it's quite nuanced of her 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, you know, a bit frumpy or are feminists are 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 doubtiness. They can also be women of all kinds, I suppose.

• 1:10:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 1:10:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, this is effectively what Virginia Woolf has self 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 Woolf herself had thought. So he's a portrait of her own kind of mental health issues. And the sort of, I think it's a, it's a, it's a groundbreaking depiction in fiction.

• 1:11:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, there's obviously something deeper because people from shell shock didn't tend to hear voices and to be, you know, to think that monsters were coming to devour them and stuff. 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?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  This is how Virginia Woolf 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 sea 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.

• 1:12:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it does. Yeah, definitely. This is one of the big themes of the book, that the line between sanity and madness is always very thin.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and you can see, you know, Virginia Woolf's dislike of doctors in the portrayal of the doctors who treat septimus, particularly the horrible, ambitious Sir William Bradshaw. He's kind of oppressively sane and conventional. He has absolutely no individuality. He later called Septimus a coward. And that kind of very much reflects the attitudes to hysteria, hysteria brought on by 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 Woolf knew people who suffered from shell shock or mental instability brought on by the war, for instance, Siegfried Sassoon. So I don't think she would have thought well of this kind of an attitude.

• 1:13:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I guess the other thing that Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway 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, to her time when she was a teenager with Sally and all this kind of thing. They're looking back to this lost paradise 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 that he can't face the future. He throws himself out of his window onto some railings down below. A horrible ending.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:14:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 happens. And they 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 a kind of celebration 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 terrible man.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  And she keeps, the one thing she keeps telling everyone is I have five sons.

• 1:15:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  I have five sons.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Five sons.

• 1:15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And 10,000 a year.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 be. It's all very disappointing.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  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. Septimus, who kind of dreamed of being a poet in his life before the war.

• 1:15:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  He's had his mind and his beliefs and his kind of heart shattered in a way. Sally Seton, well, 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 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 heartbreaking because of the way that they all recall the past. And it's that thing from Gatsby, you know, you can't bring the past back. But the thing with this is that 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 in the cloakroom. And he knew them all as young'uns, as young, bright things.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  And then seeing them all kind of old, a bit weary, a bit stolid. And 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.

• 1:16:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  I find them weirdly moving. I mean, genuinely, when I, when I, when I read the end, you know, they're sort of sitting, you know, Mrs. Dalloway's chatting, the party's kind of breaking up, her friends Sally and 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 realised 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.

• 1:17:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. 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 I think is a very sweet, sweet line.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  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 some of their kind of humdrum disappointments. You know, their jobs, their love lives, whatever it is, you know, the soul beneath can be more than that.

• 1:18:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  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, recognizing each other's flaws and stuff, and that's lovely. And it's also Elaine Scholter, who writes the introduction to the copy of Mrs. Dower that 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.

• 1:18:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the very last lines of the book, so Peter is sitting and he thinks, what is this terror? What is this ecstasy? What is this that fills you with extraordinary excitement? "It is Clarissa," he said, "for there she was." And that's the last, the last couple of lines of the book. I actually find that like, I was probably, I was gonna break down reading that because I just find that really weirdly moving.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Feel free to. Honestly, I think that would be really nice.

• 1:19:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabi, and I know you would be merciless, which would be awful.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  No, honestly, I, I'm here.

• 1:19:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  I just, I just think it's the sort of affirmation of her at the end of the book. Somebody is watching her and there she is.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, you know, as fragmented and as fragile as she is, you know, that they still, they're still bound together by their kind of childhood memories and all that sort of stuff. So we're gonna mark this, I think you had a good idea, which is we are gonna mark it in terms of Miss Kilman's eclairs. Just because we've gone on so long, I'll be very quick about it. I'm actually gonna give this 10 out of 10. I don't massively care for Virginia Woolf as a person, but I think, you know, I'd never have got on with her in a million years.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  The art should speak for itself.

• 1:19:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  The art speaks for itself, exactly. I think the art, I, I will read this book for as long as I live. I think it's a brilliant book.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I'm also giving it 10 out of 10. That's a double 10 out of 10, 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 layered and it's fragmented and it's ebbing and flowing, but you feel everything that you're meant to feel.

• 1:20:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's great. All right, now, before we go, we haven't quite finished because 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.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Huge news.

• 1:20:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Huge news. So we will be on at the South Bank Centre as part of Goalhangers The Rest Is Fest weekend. We will be on on the evening of the 5th of September. We will be chatting about books in a witty and entertaining way.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  For the first time.

• 1:20:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  For the first time ever.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Thought we'd save it for the live show.

• 1:20:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So 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.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So get your tickets now and you can come and see us live and tell us what you think of the show.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  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 [email protected] or you can send in your comments to bookclubpodhq on X and ditto bookclubpodhq on Instagram. And what have we got coming up?

• 1:21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, The Code of the Worcester's by P G Wodehouse. We're doing Louisa May Allcott'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 Tomasi de Lampe di Uso's book, The Leopard. So lots to look forward to. Thank you, Tabby. Bye bye.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

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