Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I'm in the midst of my year of reading Virginia Woolf. I plan to read all the novels, at least, but it will be hard to resist going back to the letters, the essays, and the journals. Perhaps because I'm focused on Woolf these days, her name seems to come up a lot, and in the last month or so I've encountered a claim that startled me, but does seem defensible: Virginia Woolf was a better critic than she was novelist. In both cases those who spoke this heresy acknowledged that they were being heretical in that slightly irritating "I know I'm being naughty, but . . . " manner, but again, I don't find the claim indefensible. I look forward to going back to the essays to see if any of them, or all of them taken together, could be as wonderful as Mrs Dalloway. Someone must have noticed that Mrs Dalloway is one of the great modernist novels of the city—the influence of Joyce's day in Dublin is hard to miss. Mrs Dalloway spends her day, of course, in London ...