Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The BBC, it seems

Spectator

25-06-2025

'What a lark!' I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary on Mrs Dalloway. A century has passed since Clarissa bought flowers for her midsummer party, and Radio 4 has commissioned a three-parter, with actress Fiona Shaw presenting. 'What a plunge!'
The first programme had been playing for all of two minutes before my hopes began to wilt like a delphinium. 'Her face adorns tote bags and internet memes,' says Shaw of Woolf in the preamble, which sounds as though it has been lifted directly from the series pitch to the BBC. 'I'll be asking what… Virginia Woolf has to say to us today.' There follow promises to explore Woolf's writing and to 'discover… how she challenged gender norms and wrote about mental health as human experience rather than just a medical condition'.
My heart sank further with the first of many clips from interviews with experts. One author describes, in detail, his discovery of Woolf in the hands of a girl he fancied at school. Most of the contributors, in fact, prove to be the saving grace of this series. There's a fashion in documentaries at the moment for featuring many, many talking heads. This can be dizzying, but these – who include the excellent Alexandra Harris, Francesca Wade and Bryony Randall – provide much-needed depth. Shaw meets them at various Woolfian locations, including Monk's House and Bloomsbury's Gordon Square, and things improve. I'll admit to admiring Shaw in pretty much everything she does. Here, she is an articulate interlocutor, only armed in places with the heavy-handed script.
There are some good forays into the sounds and silence of Mrs Dalloway and Woolf's aversion to Sigmund Freud. But then we realise how far from Woolf we've strayed. The novelist apparently waited until 1939 before reading any of Freud's works because she was 'wary of reductive tendencies of psychoanalysis to find a single answer'. This, indeed, was Woolf. She cannot be reduced; her prose, as we are reminded, is often concerned with the unexpressed thought. Her readers were credited with intelligence. We, on the other hand, are given the hard sell: told repeatedly not to be put off by her, not to be afraid of how difficult she is. It would have been nice to be enticed to her side with some of the subtlety and wit that won her readers in the first place.
Those still afraid of Virginia Woolf and condemning of her snobbery might find The Girls of Slender Means more to their taste. 'Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor,' begins Muriel Spark's novella. It has been adapted many times for TV and radio, including with Patricia Hodge and Miriam Margolyes, but actor-playwright Simon Scardifield's version is a welcome addition.
The narrator (Maggie Service) is skilled at weaving between character dialogue. The pauses are perfectly timed to make it sound as though she is there, observing the action, a calm voice amid the chatter of the May of Teck Club. This, the novella's setting, is a hostel for twentysomething-year-old women. Prepare for a lot of bickering over who is borrowing the Schiaparelli gown, the fat content of a cheese pie ('four million horrid calories!') and the assessment of vital statistics, hips especially.
The narrative is of its time. There is no apology for this and nor should there be. Clever Jane, who works in publishing, makes frequent references to 'brain work' – that is, reading. Like studious Pliny the Younger, averting his eyes from the erupting volcano, Jane would sooner be at her books than celebrating VE Day outside. Selina is much less intellectual and more beautiful. There is a flurry at the arrival of a male author for dinner.
The chemistry between Jane (hips: 38 inches) and author Nicholas – and Nicholas's interest in Joanna ('fair and healthy looking') – is well captured. As in Woolf, the internal narrative is all-important. Nicholas finds Joanna to be 'orgiastical' and longs to say, 'Poetry takes the place of sex for her, I think,' but doesn't. He is also eager to make love to Selina ('extremely slim') on the roof [a brilliant pause from the narrator] 'It needs to be on the roof.' Access is via a small window: suddenly hip-size matters.
I won't spoil the plot, but Scardifield has made the narrative more uplifting than the novella with a simple switch in the order in which we learn events. This – and Spark's sharp one-liners – make it blissful summer listening.