In Our Time - Mrs Dalloway

Episode Date: July 3, 2014

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.With:Professor Dame Hermione Lee President of Wolfson College, OxfordJane Goldman Reader in English Literature at the University of GlasgowKathryn Simpson Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1922, Virginia Woolf began work on a novel which many now see as her masterpiece. She called it The Hours, and in her diary she gave some indication of her ambition for the book. I want to give life and death sanity and insanity, she wrote. I want to criticise the social system and to show it at work at its most. intense. It was under a different title that the book eventually saw the light of day, three

years later. It's named after its central character Mrs. Dalloway, a wealthy woman at the heart of 1920's London society, and charge a single day in her life as she prepares to host a party. It's a richly inventive novel which deals sensitively with mental illness and the scars of the First World War, and 90 years after it was published, Mrs. Dalloway is now seen as one of the most original and innovative products of literary modernism. With me to discuss Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway are Professor Dame Hermione Lee, President of Walson College, Oxford, Jane Goldman, reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and Catherine Simpson, senior lecturer in English literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Hermione Lee, can you give us the salient features of Virginia Woolf's life up to the time she wrote, Mrs. Delahy? She was 40 when she started it. She'd been married for 10 years to Leonard Wolfe. She'd had a traumatic pre-war life on the. whole. She'd lost her mother at 13, she lost her father at 22, she lost one of her brothers at 24. She'd had a number of serious breakdowns in her teens and soon after her marriage, she'd attempted suicide in 1913. She'd been very ill during most of the war. And she also had a whole range

of symptoms in the year. She started work on Mrs. Dalloway. She'd been diagnosed with a heart murmur and she thought she might not have long to live. She'd been writing reviews, essays, stories, novels. Really, she'd been writing since she was a child. But she didn't publish her first novel until she was 33.

I think there are two other salient facts running up to the novel. One is that in 1917 she and Leonard Wolfe started their own printing press, their own publishing house, the Hogarth Press, which allowed them to publish her, rather than her having to go to another publisher.

And the other thing is that in 1924, they moved back from Richmond, where they'd been living, into central London, into Bloomsbury, in fact, into Tavistock Square. And I think those are all key factors in the background to the novel. Can you tell us how her literary style had developed

up to the time she wrote Mrs. Dallaray? Yes, she'd written three novels. She wrote two turn-of-the-century novels, 1915, 1919, the voyage out and night and day, which are really sort of end of 19th century novels about each of them really is about a young woman struggling against trying to create a life which isn't like the life she's being told to live.

And you can see that the novelist also is sort of fighting against what she sees as the conventions of the novel, rather in the way her young girls are kicking against the wall of convention. Then in the late 1910s, early 1920s, she was writing pieces about fiction and about how she thought that modern, she didn't talk about modernism, but modern fiction ought to change, needed to change, in order to deal with the sort of radically changing conditions of early 20th century life, not just the war but psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity

and all kinds of new ways of thinking about life. And the Modifies Exhibition. And all that, absolutely, post-aggressionism. And that's not, the world, was it the world change? In the 71910, the world change. Yeah. Human character change. Yeah, so, and she's thinking all the time about how can the novel deal with human character differently.

And then she starts writing little short pieces, which are very painterly, actually. Her sister was a painter, almost like Pointerlie's more impressionism, very fine-grained little pieces like Q Gardens and the Mark on the wall, trying to pinpoint the perception of a moment or a place. And out of that comes a novel called Jacob's Room, very remarkable novel, which is a kind of war novel in 1922, which tries to write the biography of a young man who's been killed in the war, but not as a solid wedge of facts through fragments and bits and pieces.

And all that process leads into the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. There's one wonderful manuscript note at the top of one of the pages of the manuscript, Mrs. Dalloway, where she says, a delicious idea comes to me that I will write anything I want to write. So she's looking for more freedom, I think. That's at the beginning of the second draft. Yeah, that's right.

So she's written the first draft, but she's finally looked at it and moved on there. And so maybe that's the moment to change her world. Catherine Simpson, can you give us a brief overview of the novel and its main events? I can. As you've already mentioned, it's a novel set on a single day in June in 1923

and was called The Hours. In many ways, it's a special. special day. It's the day of Clarissa Dalloway's party, but it's also an ordinary day, and Wolf gives us snapshots of London streets and parks, where we see a cross-section of ordinary people, just going about their daily business. The focus on the richness and importance of the everyday, I think, is something that resonates throughout Wolf's writing, and we're certainly made alert to sensation, and the qualities of being alive throughout Mrs. Dalloway. The plot is very minimal. Wolf was moving away from realist conventions.

which very much were formed around plots and were very much plot driven. And in terms of summarising the novel, it's probably best to think about the different groups of characters. Clarissa is an upper-class woman who will host a party. Clarissa Delaware. Krista Dalloway, that's right. Who will host a party for influential guests,

including the Prime Minister. On that day? On that very day. She leaves the house to get the flowers for the party in the evening. Absolutely, that's right. So she heads out into the city to buy the flowers. in some ways that purchase is really a pretext to go walking. Her husband also goes out to his office and later has lunch.

But when Clarissa returns from her shopping trip, she's visited by an old friend and would-be suitor Peter Walsh, who's just returned from India. Following this meeting, Peter also wanders the streets of London. He pursues a woman, he doses in Regent's Park, and finally goes to Clarissa's party. In fact, at the party, there is another reunion, Clarissa's other old friend and would-be lover,

Sally Seton turns up on spec. Clarissa's daughter Elizabeth also goes out on a city adventure. She goes to the Army and Navy stores with her tutor Doris Kilman and takes an omnibus at the strand and really has another city adventure. But we've got to get to Septimus. The final set of people. He's the big one. And this is the thing.

There's Clarissa Dalloway and the Septimus and others in between of great importance, but not as important as Septimus. Right. And tell us about Septimus. His day. I will. The final group then consists of war veteran Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Ritza.

They also go out into the city, they're walking the streets. They're spending time in Regent's Park as they're waiting for their Harley Street consultation with Sir William Bradshaw. Finally, everybody appears at Clarissa's party, apart from Septimus, but the news of his suicide reaches Clarissa at her party. She reflects on her own choices in life. So Septimus takes his own life. Now, can you describe, so these are the two things. She goes out, he is tormented by what they call then Shell Shock, his wife is trying to save him. He eventually commits suicide in between him, and a great number of other people,

interwoven in the novel, especially into her life. Past life and the present life, memory is very powerful as well as the present, and they merge one of the features of the novel. Is there a structure you can tell us about briefly about Mrs. Deloie? Yeah, well, what you've just said there is really important to the structure, Although we don't have a clear linear plot that will drive the narrative along, we do have all these moments of near misses, if you like. They're walking in the streets, they're crossing paths, but they're never quite meeting.

But Wolf has built into her novel lots of different connections, and that works in quite subtle ways. The chiming of Big Ben, for example, is a kind of oral reminder all the way through and we see the different characters and what they're doing at the different hours of the day, and that forms a really key structuring technique. The novel's also like a montage. It's like a cinematic text in lots of ways.

We have lots of jumps between the different experiences. And Wolf was very influenced by the cinema and by that kind of technique. But the language of the novel is also key in creating a sense of coherence because we have lots of repetitions of phrases and image patterns. We have allusions to Shakespeare and references to repeated things like flowers and barking dogs and so on. So there isn't a linear structure, but there is a coherence. It's an interconnection. I ask the question about structures

to be sort of formal about it. But sort of a day in the life is one of the great structures, isn't it? A day in the life of a penny. Was that Dickens or something? Anyway, a day in the life of a pen. So you've got the idea. It's a day in the life.

We all know about day in life. That's the structure of our most lively. Right. Jane Goldman, the phrase stream of consciousness has sometimes been applied to Virginia Woolf and it's around at the time. How much does it apply to her in Mrs. Dalloway? Well, I think it doesn't at all, really.

She writes a more unhinging kind of narrative than the stream of consciousness. And a lot of people talk about stream of consciousness when they actually mean free indirect discourse. The most famous example of stream of consciousness is Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, which of course is considered a kind of text that Wolf is in dialogue with for Mrs. Dalloway, you know, set it one day in. Dublin. So stream of consciousness is what Wolf calls being trapped in a very bright room in the luminous halo of one person's inner life. But Wolf's narratives actually switch between exterior and interior. So if I may just read you the opening lines of the novel, then tell me whether

you think you're in first person or third person. You tell me, but read them first. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges. Rumpelmire's men were coming. And then thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning, fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark. What a plunge.

For so it had always seemed. And then the doors hinges open again. So this, I would call this a kind of, there's an armature of free indirect discourse, which is the ability of the sentence to move between third person outside view and first person interior. But there's a kind of empty centre to the sentence which you as the reader have to negotiate. So Mrs. Dalloway is reading you as much as you're reading Mrs. Dalloway. And, you know, for example, when it says Mrs. Dalloway said, she, would buy the flowers herself, who is speaking those words?

And the famous critic Eric Auerbach asked this of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, who is speaking in this paragraph? And if you ask yourself that all the time, the answers are surprising. It took me years to think that perhaps Lucy is having this thought, that it's being focalised through Lucy. who's only given a first name. And Mrs. Dalloway is not the kind of author of those thoughts at all. Can I rather crudely bring you back to a broad brushstroke?

Yes. We're four years after the end of the First World War when this novel is set, and the war is hanging over the novel very densely. Yes. Could you comment on that? Well, the war is apparent in everything in this text, not just in the obvious moments where, for example, Peter is walking past the cenotaph, or Miss Kilman, the German tutor, is looking at the tomb of the unknown warrior.

And then, of course, Septimus, who is this war veteran who's deeply shocked and traumatized by remembering the death of his friend and officer Evans. But all sorts of words and images take you into the war. even when you think you're nowhere near it. For example, when Septimus sees the trees coming alive and sees his friends Evans coming out from the trees, this is related not only to his kind of psychotic state, but it's a kind of satire.

It's a comment on the fact that at the time, there was a public campaign to plant trees in memorial to the war dead. And then the word leaves, you know, vanished like leaves that's talked about the war dead. Every time you see a leaf in the tree, it's taking you to Dante, to Virgil, to this kind of accretion of imagery that comes from epic war poetry from classic times right up to the present. So shop signs, street signs. For example, when Mr. Scrope Purvis notices how nice Mrs. Dalloway looks right at the beginning, if you go away and research the name Scrope Pervis, you discover who did Wolf know who was called Pervis? Nobody in her personal acquaintance, but Pervis is the name of a great arms dealer

who made a huge amount of money out of the Nobel Explosives Company for the First World War. So these names will detonate. Yes. So in the heart of, also, can I just add? No, I want to move on now. Hermione, can you tell us a bit more about Mrs. Dalloway? And also, sorry to compound the question, but does she speak in the voice of Virginia Woolf sometimes?

Because this is often thought to be the case. It was certainly in the hours. Let's talk about Mrs. Dalloway. What about Mrs. Dalloway? I just thought picking up from what's being said, and this is relevant, this extraordinary structure whereby this woman seems to connect with all these other people in the book,

some of whom she hasn't met, like Septimus. And the fact that you don't know whether you're inside someone's head or you're in the third person, these are linked, actually. You know, she doesn't want to write... Pages. Yes, she doesn't want to write autobiographically. She's very, very keen not to write about herself. It's one of the key features.

So, like all novelists, she splits herself in the book into all different characters. So there's bits of her everywhere. So this is not an autobiographical novel at all, even though it's got an extraordinary rendering of what she experienced in mental illness. So her relation to Clarissa Dalloway is very complicated, actually. So it's partly, she takes bits from hostesses she has known because Clarissa is a kind of famous hostess, so Oteline Morel or woman called Kitty Max, who she thought was a bit glittering and tinsely, and she was worried that Clarissa would come out that way.

There's something about the death of Catherine Mansfield in there, who died in 1923, who had very strong influence on her, and this woman whom she's interested in, who dies young. That's there. Her own feelings about women are in there, her sexual feelings for women, her rather, perhaps chilly, possibly rather frigid sexual marriage to Leonard, which is nevertheless very companionable.

That's in there, She's relationship with Richard, who's always telling her to have a rest after luncheon, you know, but she sleeps on her own in a little attic room. So there are bits of other people, there's bits of herself. But in class terms, she's not a bit like Clarissa. Clarissa was a right-wing, rather ignorant politician's wife, who's going to have this rather boring Prime Minister who's a sort of skit on Stanley Baldwin to her party. This is very remote from the world of Virginia Woolf,

which is actually, you know, upper-class, professional, intellectual, artistic. It's not posh. The Bloomsbury group. Yeah, the Bloomsbury group who are not actually terribly wealthy, and they're not very posh, and they certainly don't read the right wing morning post and all of that. So in some ways, Carissa is very unlike her. But the ways I think in which there's a deep resemblance is in this, it's hard to put it, without sounding ponderous,

but a sort of rejection of tyranny, which has to do with the way that mental illness is being treated, but it also has to do with the British Empire, the behaviour of the upper classes, the British colonies. Clarissa is, she's in her class, but she's sort of oddly alien to it, and she doesn't like tyranny.

She doesn't like people to bully her, and she doesn't want to define people too closely. And I think in that sense, she's kind of an autobiographical portrait mentally, if she's like. And one thing I found when I was reading it this time, I've drawn longed, is she's, quite spectacularly and almost wonderfully self-centred.

Clarissa. Yes. I mean, when somebody dies, kills themselves, how could they spoil her party? How could people talk about it? You're all right. How could people talk about it at her party? How could bring the talk into her party? But then she says it opens out herself.

But her first reaction is like. And that's what I like about the sort of honesty of it. I don't know whether everybody is all anything, but that's a different matter. But most people see the world from that. themselves and that's why this narrative is so extraordinary. Can I ask Catherine, what do you think it's novel? I mean, Hermione has given us a huge landscape in a small thimble there.

But what's a novel about the way she portrays her characters, you see? I think some of the things that Hainey's just been saying are absolutely pertinent to that. I mean, just going back to Clarissa's party, I mean, you're right, she is very self-centered, but she takes herself off to a private room in order to reflect. And she does reflect quite critically about her own complicity in the tyrannies that, you know, are part of her society. She talks about her life being wreathed about with chatter and the splendor falling to the floor.

But about the way she portrays her characters? What's novel about that? I mean, we've been talking about Mrs. Delaware. Is there a way that she draws a character? You could say Dickens draws a character very often by exaggeration, hyperbole and so on. Is there a way that you can say Virginia will describes her character? Yes. Well, I think, again, she's very clearly moving away from a realist tradition

where characters are narrated from an external perspective, where we told about their hair colour, their status, we told the material details. What we get in Walsh is a preoccupation with the inner life, and that's why it's so fluid, that's why it's so contradictory, because she was very alert to the fact that we are constantly shifting and changing. Our moods, our emotions, our thoughts, are in constant flux. And in fact, in one of her essays called Modern Fiction,

where she's really setting out her own modernist manifesto, she talks about wanting to record the atoms as they fall on the mind. She wants that immediacy, that sensory perception, but that ever-shifting nature. And I think that's why it's quite difficult to think about characters as characters in this novel, because really they're kind of centres of consciousness. You can see why she was so besotted with the impressionists, can't you?

Absolutely, yeah, yes. Can I ask you, Jen Gohmann about time in Mrs. Delavut. It was originally called The Hours. Big Ben keeps striking. Clocks are all over the place. Right. Okay, well, it was a really... originally conceived in 12 sections, and they survive in the first British edition. There are no chapter headings, but if you look very carefully, you'll notice occasionally a space in the text, and sort of the space on the page is very important to Wolf. And the actual physicality of writing is very important, so that these selves are clearly produced in language, the skywriting plane that may or may not be spelling out Toffee or an advert, or the wonderful,

lyric singer, the violet seller who is singing these nonsense words syllabing iom phom so... What about time? Well, these take you back to different kinds of time. The aeroplane writing takes you into modernity and the ium pharma soul lyrics take you to what we would call archaeomodonism.

Yeah, but isn't time more to do the way that she... Well, there's prehistoric time. Yeah, I know about that. Sorry to be rude. Yeah, you know about it. No, no, I don't know. I'm just trying to get clear. Do you want me to talk about Berkson? No, no. I just kind of, I probably formulated the question clumsily. It seems to me that the fact that it is one day,

the fact that this party is growing near, the fact that Septimus is in a state which is waiting to kill himself. These are time-driven in a very important way. Yes, but it's not unity of time. Yes, so it's not unity of time in the classical tragedy sense where the action of the novel is coterminous with the action of the day. It's showing how time, according to Bergson,

who is very influential on modernist writing, but she didn't read it, did she? Yes, she did know about Bergson through Jane Harrison, who she read very carefully, and Jane Harrison's work refers, the classical scholar, refers to Bergson's work very carefully,

and she also attended a lecture on Bergson in about 1913. So she was very au fait with, with Berkson's theory of time. And there's spatial time, and there's something Berksin calls La Dure, and spatial time is the material, spatial world, clock time, Greenwich time, railway time.

And that's the time that is being put under scrutiny by Wolf, the calendar time. And then there's duere, the subjective non-spatial time, the time of the interior, which understands that when we open the doors in London in Westminster, we're simultaneously opening on to our past when we opened a door in Borton in the countryside. Don't you think that's the thing,

I mean whether or not she knew Bergson herself, he was sort of in the air, but don't you think the extraordinary thing about time is you've got this beating measurement of hours and minutes and we all know that sense of time pressure? And then it sort of stops and pauses, and you go into what she calls these deep pools under my characters where time doesn't actually seem to be of the essence and it's all about memory and so there's a kind of,

it's almost like a squeezy books, you know, opens out and then presses back. We know that from ourselves, don't we? They're a massive thing to have done in a novel. I mean, it's quite, it's relatively radical and new to try and get that feeling of time. What precisely is radical about it? But to have what you've been emphasizing,

which is the day in the life, to have that very gritted, very formal structure, and within that, to use a very sort of flexible sentence to open that out and stop it in its tracks and then go back in. And it's as if time dilates, isn't it? There is a sense of suspense and pause, but it's as if time opens up, it dilates. And I think what's really key for me about time in this novel is the way that we occupy an impure presence. We are in the present moment, but as you say, that's influence, shaped, coloured by our past and by past experience. And I think right at the very beginning of the novel, we've got these hinges. We've got the door hinges being taken off, which will open out the room for the party.

But that hinge, that word hinge, acts as a trigger. And it's a hinge between Carissa's present moment and this rich past that she returns to time and again. That hinge as well, it's the semicolon. Wolf was the mistress of the semicolon in a sentence. So that lovely sentence, the doors would be taken off their hinges. semicolon Rumpelmeyer's men were coming. Now can I just tell you about Rumpelmeyer's men? Because Rompelmeyer's men were caterers in London for the high society.

And therefore, one would expect them to be catering for a party entertaining the Prime Minister. However, at the same time as they clearly signal London and high society, We know that Wolf was taking Isis with her lesbian friend, Hope Mirrely's, the poet, in Paris at another place, also called Rumpelmeyers. And she also met Jeeze translator Dorothy Boussey at Rumpelmeyers in Paris. So can you see how this is a portal, this sentence is a portal and it's asking you, are you going to be at the party with the warmongering Prime Minister pouring him a drink? or are you going to be taking Isis with

Safic bohemiums in Paris? And the other side of the sentence, the doors would be taken off their hinges, is clearly a reference to Walt Whitman. When he says, unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jams. And we know Wolf was reading Whitman at the time

and that there are other references to Whitman in the text. So there's a kind of apocalyptic, poetic entrance portal into another possible time. And it's about being unhinged? It is about being unhinged. It'll unhinges you. Maybe it's been about a threshold as well, standing on the threshold of a doorway. So Mrs. Dalloway has choices, doesn't she? She doesn't have to be this warmongering society hostess. She could have fallen in love with Sally Seton. She was in love with Sally Seaton.

She's gone off. I'm going to move to class because it's full of it. 1920s, social distinction, very acute. Am I any? Well, you quoted earlier on, I think her line when she's working on the book, when she says, I want to criticise the social system

and show it at work at its most intense. So you've got the whole stratum, actually. You've got the posh chaps in their clubs. You've got royalty going through the town in its closed car. You've got grand upper-class ladies who are so idiotic they can barely write a letter to the Times. And what they want to write a letter to the Times about

is how good it would be to solve the population problem, the overpopulation in Britain and the underpopulation in Canada by sending lots of healthy eugenically tested people out to go and live in Canada. So you've got all that. You've got rich consultants making money out of their patients. You've got the whole system of the establishment and the whole party-going world where money is being spent. And you have classes, class in Little Cherry, which is snobbery, which is around the place.

Well, there's a problem with the book, which is that she goes right down through the social layers to the self-educated clerk who becomes a war veteran to the tramp woman selling violets in the street. And she gets, she's gotten to a lot of trouble for that because there are some sort of eye-rollingly tactless ways of rendering Cockney speak and there's a notorious sentence which I'm very fond of where she says the mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young and she gets into trouble for that but actually it's problematic because she's not just being a terrible snob though there's a bit of that she's she's trying hard to look at the whole structure of society and she is also writing about snobbery and Clarissa herself is very much at odds with her own

posh world. And if this isn't pushing it a bit, the whole structure of the novel that Catherine has been talking about, the way that it moves across this network of people and voices, is sort of in itself democratic, actually. I mean, it's trying to break down.

The very fact you can have this almost telepathic relationship between this posh society right-wing hostess and this poor wrecked Clark is a kind of class crossing. I'm going to ask you to be I'll be brief for the next two or three questions because I want to get on to Septimus.

But Jane Gorman, can you briefly tell us what connections there were with books around at the time? I'm calling them both books, Ulysses and the Wasteland, the poem, the great Elliott poem. Were they feeding into her? Yes, definitely. For example, the flower seller whose song is described as issuing from a rude mouth, she's also referred to as a rusty pump. Well, I think that's a reference to the Hades section of Ulysses, so the rusty pump is an image from Ulysses.

Had she read these two? Yes, yes, she was going, she was asked to publish Ulysses, and she certainly was one of the first champions of it in modern fiction, her essay, in which she explains what she thinks is good and what's not so good about Joyce's narrative technique. Very mixed feelings.

And also Septimus, You can see that Septimus is called at one point a drowned sailor. And there are huge numbers of references to the kind of Dante-esque London escape of the wasteland, Elliot's wasteland, which of course, Wolf set in type herself for the Hogarth Press. And also, Elliot came round to Leonard and Virginia Woolf's house and intoned the poem to them. So she heard it read outlined by Elliot before it was even published. So she knew it deeply And it's her kind of response

To that kind of idea of a failed elegy What's the significance, Catherine Simpson, about the big shopping expedition The sort of aerial view of a particular part Of the west end of London, region street, Bond Street, All that sort of stuff Well, I think shopping in the novel Is incredibly interesting

You know, this is known as... Yeah, but what about that particular expedition of hers? You mean, Clarice's walk through the different streets. For the flowers. Well, I think one of the things the novel doing is mapping a transition from a kind of elitist kind of shopping experience. You know, Clarissa buys her flowers

in a posh florist on Bond Street. But what we get also in the novel is obviously that stunt, the aeroplane stunt of the writing in the sky. So we get this real sense of a process of transition. So we get Clarissa,

as we might expect, walking the streets in a quite sedate way, absorbing sensations and getting quite a lot of pleasure from from her shopping trip. But we're also aware that shopping in the novel isn't just about buying things. Shopping is, in lots of ways,

a pretext for the surfacing of other desires. I was just saying the city is so glamorous and fetching. But it's also a kind of cold place because you're constantly walking past people who are in deep trouble. So you might be going out to buy your flowers. There's someone going mad on the bench next to you. Can we talk about supplements now?

Because it's about time, isn't it? She said she wanted to write about sanity and insanity and Septimus is in a state which, let's not call it insanity but let's just say use deep trouble. He is shell shock. We know because of the letter, his friend, he is tormented, his Italian wife

who's a wonderfully sympathetic character. He's just trying to be with him and by being with him, save him. And can you say more than that, please, Omanie? I think she's doing several things with Septimus and I think they're all extraordinarily brave. She's partly trying to write

incoherent and vivid and imaginative prose, the incoherent experience of what it feels like to be, if you want to name it bipolar, or many of her own symptoms of hallucinations and feeling that messages are being sent to you, these sort of strange and terrible feelings, and feeling them worthless and being unable to feel normally. All those things she tries to put interceptions,

and she purposely does it, I think, into a character that's as least like her as possible, so she won't be seen to be writing about herself. It's a very brave and very troubling piece of writing all the way through. I think the same thing, you mentioned Rizia, his wife, and I think that's extraordinary. She's not just writing about what it's like to feel unhinged. She's writing about what it's like to look after that person.

That is a terrible, terrible thing, and I think that's one of the most brilliant things in the book, actually. So do I. I mean, she made about four strokes. She gets her, doesn't she? Absolutely wonderful. And the other thing I think is about the official treatment of mental illness. And here she gets very polemical, very fierce, and almost knocks out the novel by the force of her agitation about this,

which is the GP who's completely hopeless and says, oh, go out and play golf, get some fresh air. And the consultant who wants to put him in a home, give him the rest treatment, separate him from his family. These were all treatments that were thought to be acceptable. for mental illness at the time. But she sees them as forms of tyranny and control. And it's quite clear that there's an agenda in this novel about how mental patients are and how people in distress are treated. Although she doesn't put that sort of stress on Mrs. Dalloway,

Mrs. Dalloway's mind is fragmenting again and again. She's having a real right-the-way through. You mentioned the word accordion, Constantine before. It's quite like that, isn't it? And she pulls herself together again. So there's an affinity to it. between this extreme breakdown and the instability of Mrs. Dalloway's relationship to the real world around her, which we see so vividly. Can you introduce us to the sexuality in the novel, Catherine Simpson, please?

Yeah, well, we might expect that the novel would be a tale of marital bliss, you know, given the title and so on. But obviously there is an ongoing dilemma for Clarissa. Is she going to marry, or as she contemplates her choice to marry Richard Dalloway? but we're also aware that her choice as an 18-year-old was never that straightforward. She was also very much in love with Sally Seton and aware that... And like a kiss which turned the world upside down. And the kiss that turned the world upside down. Absolutely.

And that's the most exquisite moment that she goes back to time and time and again. And I think Wolf is doing lots of things here. And also the recurrence of Sally comes to the party uninvited. Absolutely, she comes on spec. And her main topic of conversation is I have five sons. That's right. But she also brings a radiance to the party when you look at the detail. You know, when Sally enters the room, there's a radiance there.

So although Sally has aged and doesn't have quite the allure that she used to have, there is still some connection. There's still something powerful. But I think Wolf, in introducing kind of homoerotic desires and the homosexual experience is really talking about, again, a critique of the social system that constrains people, that limits people. She creates these very fluid characters and this idea of a more fluid sexuality is key to that, really.

This is a treacherous digression, and maybe if it doesn't work out of Paul Beck, but given that E.M. Forst was terrified of his life out of publishing Morris at the time. She's bowling away with lesbianism in her book, and was there any voice, yes, she was raising her hand, so there may have been a voice raised. Well, we now know that Wolfe's later work,

Orlando was on the census desk, but managed to escape censorship in 1928. When D.H. Lawrence's novel was banned for obscenity and then the well of loneliness was banned for obscenity. Because the two women spent the night again. That night they didn't part. They were not parted. And yet, Wolf can describe this fantastic orgasm that Sally Seaton gives her

and she remembers all her life and gets away with it. I mean, actually to describe two women kissing, If you were to impose those standards of 1928, how did she get away with it? Well, you tell us. I mean, how did she get away with it? Amaya, do you know how she got away with it? Free and direct discourse.

I think people didn't miss it. I think people didn't, you know, I mean, it's not like the rainbow or women in love or Ulysses, you know. There's no shocking language. There's no graphic sexuality. It's highly dressed up in, in, metaphor the kiss that show, you know, I mean, if you're a censor and you say, you come to a censor who says it was like a match burning in a crocus, you're probably not going to think,

oh, we better not have that, you know, it might shock the British public and corrupt the young, you know, so it's actually quite dressed up. But I also think that that moment of the kiss is immediately halted. Peter Walter interrupts them, you know, he says, a man comes in. And, you know, the novel describes it as something shocking, something horrific. but at the surface of the narrative that moment has been halted I mean it hasn't because it has this rich

afterlife and I think it's I think that idea of encoding I think that's how she did get away with it She also explicitly says in another turn of the dice she could have loved Ms. Kilman who's this kind of stage lesbian who seems to be reviled in the novel

but I think the most radical thing she does is to show how compulsory heterosexuality is aligned with the class system with imperialism and this kind of gender alignment is deeply connected to these big ideological questions of young men sacrificing their lives for the war. And at one point, Septimus has described as having gone to war for Shakespeare and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress

who has inducted him into pastoral poetry and Shakespeare as a way of, you know, just as young men did go to war with Polgrave's golden treasury in their back pocket. And were volunteers for the first two and a half years of the war. Yes. So the power of language, poetic language, to kill people, basically. But in terms of sexuality also, I do think that what's going on in this book and in others of her novels is this need for space and freedom within sexual relations.

The reunion when her old lover Peter, who she didn't marry, because he would have always been at her all the time. So he went to India and got married unsuccessfully. She stayed in London and got married unsuccessfully. And he comes back and there she is, still having her parties, you know. But he was the person she didn't marry because he would always be at her and bothering her sexually emotionally, whereas Richard gives her space. But what she loves about him, and they're sitting in the room,

and he's fingering his phallic pen knife when she's mending her dress. And they're talking. And there's this phrase which says, they went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And it's one of those magical moments in the novel where this is what sexual knowledge of, you know, freedom, intimacy, that's what it should be like, a kind of free, thoughtful. Is there a sense in which the prose itself is sort of sexually ecstatic on a lot of occasions? Yes, I think it comes to climaxes on Brackley every page.

There's also the case. You remember when Septimus is in the park and he's having this apocalyptic vision. of when dogs will become men. Well, a Sky Terrier is busy making love to his ankle just at that moment. I didn't notice that. You should go back and look. I can't really often enough, can you, really?

But it's to do with that sense of reconciling animality and reason, you know, and if you disavow your animality and your sexuality, then all these horrific things will follow. Okay. We haven't got much time. What's the most important thing you haven't said? What's the most important thing I haven't said?

Ammione. What it is that she's doing that goes on into her later work and has a huge influence, I think, is not only all the things we've been talking about in terms of time and space and moving in and out of people's minds, but also the simple fact that she chooses a very unremarkable woman. She chooses a rather, you know, everyday day in this woman's life.

She goes inside the life of this woman in relation to all these other people we've been talking about. And she does it again, actually, in the next novel, which is more of a family novel to the lighthouse. And I think this thing of putting the emphasis on what has might have been thought of as very unremarkable and not worth writing a novel about has an enormous effect on other writers after her. And I think now we take it for granted. At that time, I think it's very, very revolutionary. Well, thank you all very much. I'm sure there's another five programs there.

And over the space of time, we may return to do another five programs. Catherine and Catherine Simpson, Amanda Lee, Jane Coldman. Thank you for listening. Next week, we'll be talking about the signs of the sun. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin

and his guests. She's writing about dogs. I was really, I mean, I was a bit, a bit rush, There's so much to say, and you were so capable of... Sorry about the beginning. No, no, no, no. You didn't let me finish my sentence.

You're also capable of doing it yourselves that I thought I'd better try to share it around me. I've lost two... No, I haven't put them in my pocket? I've got a pocket full of perfect lends. I mean, it's my knife. Can I talk about similes and metaphors in Mrs. Dalloway? Please do.

It's so wonderful, the way the narrative, and she does this, I mean, she perfects it, I think, in the waves, where she introduces this wonderful simile, you know, that the morning is fresh as if issued to children on a beach. So immediately we're all thinking of the childhood beach we were issued with. But it's funny when you read her now, because in some way she seems, you know, it's decades ago this book. And what I find difficult is to think myself back

into what it would be like reading it in the 1920s. finish about the simile though. But these similes are very formal in a way. Yeah, but then what she does is she says, as if issued to children on a beach. So you know that there's a reality, which is London on a certain morning, and you know that the figure of speech is

the children being issued a morning on the beach. And then suddenly it goes, what a lark, what a plunge. And then it's the flap of a wave. And suddenly we're in opaque a metaphor. And suddenly we don't know whether this is figurative or realistic ground, and it's completely taken the ground from under you.

She sort of moves into inhabiting what you were talking about, these tropes, these figures that you travel through the novel. And absolutely, and I think that idea of metaphor itself is really key, because what a metaphor does is compares one thing with something else, but what's important is what's in between. It's not the two entities. It's what goes on in between, and I think that is... It's the hinges again.

It's the hinges, but it's, you know, what Wolf is doing in this novel, the time she's thinking about the in-between. When she's drawing characters, it's not the individuals themselves, it's the connections between them, the relations between them. When she's thinking about different events, it's not the discrete events themselves, it's how they connects. Can I ask you? Do you remember

when you first read it and what it felt like when you first read it? Yeah, I was at Oxford and when you were, and I got it in the Oxfam shop and paperback. You didn't get it on your curriculum? No, no, no, I had history. And I just gulped it down. I would just look, oh.

And what was the bit that got you? I liked the prose. Yeah. The prose is the star. I just felt, ooh, I'm surfing, I just loved it. I couldn't get enough that. I mean, I sort of almost hooked up. And was that the first one?

Was that your first Virginia Woolfell? I think it was. I'm pretty sure it was. Yeah, let's say it was. I can't remember. And it's your favourite then? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. That's why you chose it.

Yeah, that's why I chose. Usually you're offered tea and coffee, but you're not being offered at this morning because we have a VIP coming, and I can say, this because Tom can always chop it off. Tom usually comes in saying tea or coffee and cheers us all up instead of saying we have to go quickly because the menacing men of security are moving into and allow Hillary Clinton to go on until the women's hour. Exactly so, thank you very much. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash Radio 4.