Virginia Woolf

Library of the World's Best Literature Virginia Woolf

Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to "Mrs. Dalloway"?

"Mrs. Dalloway" is set in 1923, five years on from the global influenza pandemic that killed somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. Clarissa Dalloway is one of the survivors. On the book's second page, in the first of many perspective shifts, a neighbor of Clarissa's watches her and observes that she has "grown very white since her illness"; in the next paragraph, we learn that her heart had been "affected . . . by influenza."

Reading "Mrs. Dalloway" as, at least in part, "a novel devoted to influenza" puts Clarissa's pleasure in traversing the city in a new light. So does reading it in the midst of our own pandemic, which has temporarily dissolved the busy urban scenes Woolf describes so lovingly throughout her book. For Clarissa, London is animated by "divine vitality" its density and crowding--precisely what would have made it deadly in 1918--are seen as signs of life. "In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June." When I reread the novel recently, this passage, which has always thrilled me, had an even stronger charge. Woolf's vivid description of a crowded metropolis right now, when our own cities' streets lie empty, feels like something out of a fantasy novel.

This edition is unique through the Anatoly Toss computer-made illustrations, which were not in the original edition.