Mrs Dalloway

3 Jul, 2014 820 English and Old English literatures

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

  • Hermione Lee
    Hermione Lee Google Books →
  • Jane Goldman at the University of Glasgow
    Jane Goldman at the University of Glasgow
  • Kathryn Simpson at Cardiff Metropolitan University
    Kathryn Simpson at Cardiff Metropolitan University
  • The International Virginia Woolf Society
    The International Virginia Woolf Society Google Books →
  • The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
    The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
  • About Virginia Woolf Selected Papers
    About Virginia Woolf Selected Papers
  • How Should One Read A Book?
    How Should One Read A Book?
  • A Room of One's Own
    A Room of One's Own
  • Mrs Dalloway - Wikipedia
    Mrs Dalloway - Wikipedia
  • 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) (1st edition 1925, reprinted Oxford University Press 2008 ) Google Books →
  • Selected Essays
    Virginia Woolf (ed. David Bradshaw) (1st edition 1926, reprinted Oxford University Press 2008 ) Google Books →
  • A Room of One's Own
    Virginia Woolf (ed. Morag Shiach) (1st edition 1929, reprinted Oxford University Press 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.