Mrs Dalloway

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. First published in 1925, it charts a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prosperous member of London society, as she prepares to throw a party. Writing in her diary during the writing of the book, Woolf explained what she had set out to do: ‘I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity. I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense.’ Celebrated for its innovative narrative technique and distillation of many of the preoccupations of 1920s Britain, Mrs Dalloway is now seen as a landmark of twentieth-century fiction, and one of the finest products of literary modernism.

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Guests

• Professor Dame Hermione Lee 5 episodes
  President of Wolfson College, Oxford
• Jane Goldman No other episodes
  Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow
• Kathryn Simpson No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University

Reading list

• Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language
  Judith Allen (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings
  Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (eds.) (New York University Press, 1997) Google Books →
• Modernism: The New Critical Idiom
  Peter Childs (Routledge, 2007) Google Books →
• The Hours
  Michael Cunningham (Fourth Estate, 2003) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf
  Jane Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• 'With you in the Hebrides': Virginia Woolf and Scotland
  Jane Goldman (Bloomsbury Heritage Monograph, Cecil Woolf, 2013) Google Books →
• Virginia Woolf
  Hermione Lee (Vintage, 1997) Google Books →
• Virginia Woolf: Writers and Their Work
  Laura Marcus (Northcote House, 2004) Google Books →
• New Casebooks: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
  Su Reid (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 1993)
• Mrs Dalloway
  Virginia Woolf (ed. David Bradshaw) (Oxford University Press, 1st edition 1925, reprinted 2008) Google Books →
• Selected Essays
  Virginia Woolf (ed. David Bradshaw) (Oxford University Press, 1st edition 1926, reprinted 2008) Google Books →
• A Room of One's Own
  Virginia Woolf (ed. Morag Shiach) (Oxford University Press, 1st edition 1929, reprinted 2008) Google Books →
• Mrs Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence
  Virginia Woolf (ed. Stella McNichol) (Vintage, 2010) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b048033q

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048033q

Auto-category: 823.912 (English fiction, 1900-1945)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1922, Virginia Woolf began work on a novel which many now see as her masterpiece.