Mrs Dalloway

In 1922, Virginia Woolf was living between London and Rodmell in Sussex, writing in a room at Monk's House and running a printing press with her husband, Leonard Woolf. The press was the Hogarth Press, which they had started in 1917 partly as therapy and partly as freedom. It mattered enormously, because it meant Woolf answered to no publisher. She could write something strange and print it herself.

Mrs Dalloway is a novel that takes place in one June day in London, following Clarissa Dalloway, a politician's wife planning a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War whose path never quite crosses hers. Woolf built it out of a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, and for a long time called the book The Hours.

Her diaries record how she found her method. She spoke of digging caves behind her characters, so that memory and present moment could sit in the same sentence. That was new. Instead of narrating a life from birth, she let a whole life surface inside an ordinary morning.

The war was close. It had ended only a few years earlier, and London was full of men who had come back wrong. Woolf had her own history of breakdowns and of doctors who prescribed rest and silence, so the novel's contempt for those doctors comes from somewhere real. She was writing about grief while the country was still deciding to call it peace.

The Hogarth Press published the book in 1925, the same year as her essay collection The Common Reader. Reviews were mixed but serious. Some readers found it thin on story; others saw at once that English fiction had shifted. Over the following decades it became one of the central books of literary modernism, taught, argued over, and read for its treatment of madness, memory and women's inner lives.

Its afterlife kept growing. Michael Cunningham borrowed Woolf's old working title for his 1998 novel The Hours, which was filmed in 2002 and sent a new generation back to the original.