A day in the life of…
Stuff, shall I say, is always turning up, directly concerning or skirting about, all things Mrs Dalloway - new interpretations and philosophical insights, adaptations in print, film, theatre. Not surprisingly, then, my blog posts about this particular Virginia Woolf novel are steadily mounting; so, as I continue to accumulate some of the fragments of this day in a life (lives, to be precise) that has so established itself beyond the fictional, I will collect together on this page any of my relevant posts (also of course to be accessed from search, archive, etc.) and information to be found elsewhere in the web. (This, in my own interest, it should be said; as I would like to write something special of my own about this most admired - and quietly important - work of literature, and a direct point of reference would be convenient.) Mrs Dalloway (1925) has very much taken on a life of her own, occupying a special place in the Woolf world - as a legendary "one day" narrative, like James Joyce's Ulysses published three years before (and famously turned down by the Woolfs in 1918) but simpler, infinitely more readable, but at the same time so finely crafted and profound in its blurring of the edges of time and memory. Modernism did not - does not - have to be difficult.
Notebook Drafts
At the British Library, one has access to a number of wonderful Virginia Woolf resources; amongst other things, manuscript viewer presentations of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway notebooks with their working title of “The Hours”. Following are direct links to the draft manuscripts.
- Volume I (Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Volume I) (27 June 1923–after 28 January 1924)
- Volume II (Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Volume II) (18 April–after 20 October 1924)
- Volume III (Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Volume III) (31 July–4 October 1924 )