Seize the day: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ turns one hundred

I’m at the park with my daughter, who is jumping in and out of puddles, splashing, shrieking at me (Mum! Look what I can do!), as I read frantically, taking one-handed notes on my phone (Mum! Look at this!). Part of me wishes I could enjoy with her this moment of pleasure in movement. The other, more insistent part is thinking about this essay: where to start, what to say, how to sum up the extraordinary legacy of the book I’m re-reading, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which this year marks 100 years since its first publication in 1925. How am I supposed to write about this book?

If you were to read a synopsis, it might seem like a book purely for an academic specialist (which, admittedly, I am). One day in London in June 1923, an ageing rich woman, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to give a party. Across town, a shell-shocked Great War veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, loses his grip on sanity. Between them oscillate other characters: Clarissa’s former lover Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s husband Richard and daughter Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s tutor Doris Kilman, Septimus’s wife Rezia, and his doctors Holmes and Bradshaw.

Like that other modernist monument, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows ordinary people through ordinary activities on…

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