Latest news with #Mrs.Dalloway
Express Tribune
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
A 100 years on, Mrs Dalloway continues to walk
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved. Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
Express Tribune
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved.
Boston Globe
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In defense of the em dash
There are But as some have Advertisement ChatGPT's writing is the product of the 90 Pulitzer Prize nominees from 1924 to 2020, 95 bestsellers from The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly in the same timeframe, and other works it was If you're feeling unsure about how to use the punctuation mark, the em dash (—) can be used to set off extra information — like a Shakespearean aside — in the middle of a longer passage. It functions like — and can be used instead of — commas or parentheses. With an em dash, you can rise above an ordinary train of thought as if on an observation deck — wow! Advertisement Citing one piece of punctuation to judge whether something has been written by artificial intelligence is dangerous. It could lead to teachers grading their students improperly or prospective hires being rejected. After all, great writers have used the em dash throughout history. In 'Mrs. Dalloway,' Virginia Woolf combined em dashes with semicolons and sprinkled them like seeds on the breeze: 'How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' — was that it? — 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' — was that it?' The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once went comedically overboard in his journal to prove a point: 'I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself,' wrote Kierkegaard. Advertisement Being em-dash-happy isn't a style that ChatGPT invented, and we shouldn't give it credit for that. Real em dash fans have been singing its praises online for years. 'The em dash can also usurp the semicolon's glory — for it shows more than equality! The em dash has its own veritable inflection — its own tempo! One can use it profusely to show excitement and dynamism of thought,' — long before ChatGPT made its Kool-Aid-man-esque entrance into our lives. Now the em dash might need our help. A new generation of writers must feel free to use the fanciful — if sort of funky looking — punctuation in peace. It's there to let them set their creative impulses free. As one poster I use the em dash because it allows me to construct sentences — castles of thought, really — that contain unexpected, experimentally jazzy multitudes. Long story short — they're fun. I will not let ChatGPT — the 'helpful' roommate who dyes all your white socks beige in the wash of literature — make writing less fun.
New York Times
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
One Exhilarating, Excruciating Night in Nell Zink's Berlin
There's a moment in J.D. Salinger's short story 'Teddy,' in which a boy watches his younger sister drink a glass of milk. He describes this vision as God 'pouring God into God.' Nell Zink's new novel, 'Sister Europe,' ends with a moment so lambent — but it takes one excruciating, tangled, exhilarating, humiliating night to get us there. Many novels take place over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway,' James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Nicholson Baker's 'The Mezzanine.' Fewer chart the course of a single evening, as does 'Sister Europe' — although Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark' is another that comes to mind. To stay out late in Zink's world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don't know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality — a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn't happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations. The events in 'Sister Europe' occur on a Tuesday night in 2023. The place: a mediocre luxury hotel in Berlin. The occasion: a second-rate literary award ceremony. A $54,000 prize for Arabic writing is being given to a Bedouin writer who sounds a good deal like Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie character comes in for some ribbing. One wit comments that he probably uses A.I. to churn out his wordy and florid fables. Few of the guests want to be there. The evening is drudgery. The speeches are too long, the food is execrable (one attendee calls the entree 'Michelin mystery meat') and no alcohol can be had because of the event's Muslim hosts and guests. The prevailing mood is: Get me out of here. Among this book's primary characters is Demian, a German art critic, who is married to an American structural engineer named Harriet. They have a 15-year-old daughter, Nicole, who is transitioning from male to female. To her father's surprise, Nicole turns up at the hotel with Demian's friend Toto, an American publisher. Toto had recognized Nicole, in a party dress and with bee-stung lips, posing as a streetwalker in a red-light district, and invited her to the event to get her off the corner. Harriet is calm about Nicole's transition and her desire to take puberty blockers. Demian is less sanguine. He has a liberal intellect but a conservative gut, and he has an instinct to protect her from decisions made in haste. He battles his transphobia, Zink writes, but 'clearly hoped Nicole would emerge from her gaudy chrysalis as just another twink in golf duds.' Nicole is carefully and vividly drawn. She's a bird shivering on a wire. She's in an awkward phase, but then who isn't at 15? Zink writes: Demian seems relatively unperturbed that his daughter was (apparently) streetwalking, and similarly unperturbed when she vanishes into the hotel with a sybaritic prince, Radi, who has sexual designs on her. No real sex takes place in this novel, though it's gently pervy, like Mr. Whipple squeezing the Charmin. A main topic in 'Sister Europe' is indeterminacy. All of us are between stages, this novel suggests, at every moment. Another main topic is Berlin and its discontents. Zink, who has lived in and around the city for many years, catalogs the ghosts that continue to haunt it. A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. 'Sister Europe' lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some. All evening, an undercover cop named Klaus is following Nicole, thinking she may be the victim of sex trafficking. He represents the Chekhovian gun that keeps threatening to go off. He's an oddly comic fellow. In a film version, he'd be portrayed by the wonderful Yuriy Borisov, who plays the fragile and sentimental hired muscle in 'Anora.' After the ceremony, the characters spill out onto Berlin's wet, chilly, windswept streets. The merry revelers — among them Demian, Nicole, Radi, Toto and a young woman nicknamed the Flake (whom Toto met on a dating app) — form a sexy caravan. People stop and stare. Zink has a way of rendering even a late-night walk indelible, as if each moment has been tapped with a sprinkle from Tinkerbell's wand: I won't spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that these characters, along with an intimidating poodle, end up together in a space that functions as a kind of black-box theater, one with Nazi associations. Bring your black turtleneck; you may briefly feel you are in an absurdist Wallace Shawn play. Some of the characters pair off. For others, it's a school night. The cop is outside looking in. Is he really a gentle screw-up? Or will that Chekhovian gun finally go off?
Boston Globe
20-02-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Friend complains about politics but does nothing
I know confronting her with what I see is her own hypocrisy won't go over well. Last time we had one of these conversations, it made me super uncomfortable. I asked her why she talks to me about this so much and what purpose it served since we can't solve the world's problems. She said that 'you have good ideas, maybe you'll have a solution.' Well, I do have a good idea, and it is for her to sell her second home and fund some college scholarships, pay for drug/alcohol rehab for those who want it, provide housing, used cars, day care, and other things to those in need. She could single-handedly change and improve dozens of lives. Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up I expect my solution will go over like a ton of bricks but I'm tired of hearing about her angst when she actually has the ability to do some real good in this world instead of just talking about it. Advertisement Please advise. DO GOODER A. I don't see why you can't offer the suggestions you listed here. If you're afraid of coming off as too dogmatic, frame them as suggestions or even find some charities or nonprofits you want to support and ask her if she'll join you. If you expect your solution to go over like a ton of bricks, you have nothing to lose. And, who knows, one of those bricks might lay the foundation for more charitable actions. Q. My husband has a block, mentally, where he cannot buy flowers. I think he is willfully incompetent. It's not as if he were beaten with a bouquet or forced to eat them as a child. Advertisement I tried bargaining with him to back off since I've bought my own and prefer to choose my own bouquets. But he wants/defends the job of buying them as well as the privilege of withholding them from me, which is so amazingly passive-aggressive. He wants power. He is insane to try controlling the flowers. I don't have time for him flopping around making mouth sounds about 'wanting to' but just not being smart enough to figure out the flowers in our small town. He seems bent on controlling the flowers in our home (he doesn't have allergies), while I hope in vain for him to decide to buy a poppy. I suspect he wants an audience for the act of buying the flowers since he has literally bought me flowers less than 10 times in 30 years. FLOWER DISEMPOWERED A. Please make like Virginia Woolf's character Mrs. Dalloway and buy the flowers yourself, no matter what your husband says. He does not get to tell you when and how you get flowers. And you don't have to engage in the back and forth about it. You can even set up a regular pickup or delivery from your favorite florist, a great way of supporting a small business and bypassing his antics. His behavior is controlling and concerning. And it's worth asking what this is really about, because it seems things have spiraled. Your husband may think that he is being robbed of the opportunity to give you a loving gesture when you buy the flowers yourself, but if he can't accept that you have autonomy and your own taste and, I presume, enough vases for multiple bouquets, then there's a bigger problem here. If he was just carping about wanting to buy them, that's one (problematic but fixable) thing. But the withholding is something else entirely. Why is he hellbent on depriving you of joy? Advertisement Your husband should not be trying to control anything you do. It's important to have a serious conversation during which you lay down a boundary about the flowers and anything that's behind them. But I would also encourage you to look at other areas of your marriage and home life and evaluate them for controlling behavior, too. Even if this is isolated, it will be helpful to talk to a friend or loved one about what's going on, to get an outside view and support, if needed. R. Eric Thomas can be reached at .
