Why Woolf?

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions. One notably ardent participant is Mark Hussey, a scholar of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, who marked the anniversary by publishing a “biography” of Mrs Dalloway. His book traces the novel’s antecedents, its birth and welfare during Woolf’s lifetime, its shifting fortunes after her death in 1941 at age 59, and its prodigious cultural offspring — much as if he were writing about the life of a person in the world.

Hussey’s is not the first book of its kind, and it won’t be the last. In fact, his is the inaugural volume of Manchester University Press’ planned series of biographies of beloved novels, and it is a paragon of the form: efficiently written, yet chock-full of virtues large and small. It reminds me of Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2020 book Three Rings, a small but mighty volume that mapped the life and afterlife of Homer’s Odyssey, exploring how that ancient tale has served through the centuries as a randy literary progenitor, endlessly spawning other books. Like Mendelsohn’s, Hussey’s study is a love letter to its subject in all the right ways: accessible and jargon-free, fond but not fawning, curatorial but never pedantic, honest yet unfailingly tactful.

Virginia Woolf recycled the figure of Clarissa Dalloway, a lesser character in her first novel who became a full-blown protagonist in her fourth. That first novel was called The Voyage Out and is a much more traditional book, decorously issued in 1915 by the publishing company owned by Woolf’s stepbrother Gerald Duckworth. It features a marriage plot that veers from others of its kind by killing off its young heroine at the end. In the decade after Woolf wrote The Voyage Out, she lived through the Great War and suffered a prolonged period of mental illness, emerging from both determined to forge a new