Questões de Inglês

                   Alice Munro

[1]     Alice Munro (born July 10, 1931, 
Wingham, Ontario, Canada—died May 13, 
2024, Port Hope, Ontario) was a Canadian 
short-story writer who gained international 
[5] recognition with her exquisitely drawn 
narratives. The Swedish Academy dubbed her a 
“master of the contemporary short story” 
when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for 
Literature in 2013. Munro’s work is noted for 
[10] its precise imagery and narrative style, which is

at once lyrical, compelling, economical, and 
intense, revealing the depth and complexities 
in the emotional lives of everyday people. 

    Munro was raised on what she called 
[15] “this collapsing enterprise of 
a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most 
disreputable part of town.” Her mother, a 
teacher, played a significant role in her life, as 
did her great-aunt and her grandmother. She 
[20] attended the University of Western Ontario but 
left after two years of studying English and 
journalism. At age 20, in 1951, she married her 
first husband, James Munro, and moved 
to Vancouver. She moved again in 1963, 
[25] to Victoria, where the couple started a 
bookstore and together raised three daughters. 
After her first marriage ended in 1972, she 
returned to Ontario and settled in Clinton, near 
her childhood home, where she lived with her 
[30] second husband (married 1976). 

    Munro had begun writing stories as a 
teenager, and she persevered in her attempt to 
establish herself as a writer despite years of 
rejection from publishers and the limitations 
[35] imposed on her career by the responsibilities 
of marriage and motherhood. Her first 
collection of stories was published as Dance of 
the Happy Shades (1968). It is one of three of 
her collections—the other two being Who Do 
[40] You Think You Are? (1978; also published 
as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose) 
and The Progress of Love (1986)—awarded the 
annual Governor General’s Literary Award for 
fiction. Lives of Girls and Women (1971) was 
[45] conceived as a novel but developed into a 
series of interrelated coming-of-age stories. 
Like much of her fiction, the tales capture the 
social and cultural milieu of her native 
southwestern Ontario. Munro embraced the 
[50] mystery, intimacy, and tension of the ordinary 
lives of both men and women, rooted in the 
uncharted and ambivalent landscape of what 
affectionately came to be known as “Munro 
country.” 

[55]    Her later volumes include Something 
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The 
Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My 
Youth (1990), A Wilderness Station (1994), 
and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The 
[60] latter volume received 
both Canada’s esteemed Giller Prize (later the 
Scotiabank Giller Prize) and the National Book 
Critics Circle Award in the U.S. Her book Open 
Secrets (1994) contains stories that range in 
[65] setting from the semicivilized hills of southern 
Ontario to the mountains of Albania. 
In Runaway (2004) Munro explores the depths

of ordinary lives through the use of temporal 
shifts and realistically rendered reminiscences; 
[70] it also was awarded the Giller Prize. The View 
from Castle Rock (2007) combines history, 
family memoir, and fiction into narratives of 
questionable inquiries and obscure replies. In 
2009 Munro won the Man Booker International 
[75] Prize; that same year she published the short
story collection Too Much Happiness. 

    Like much of her oeuvre, the stories 
in Dear Life (2012) were unified by 
examinations of sex, love, and death. Four of 
[80] the stories in the collection were explicitly 
framed as fictionalized autobiography meant 
to encapsulate the aging Munro’s feelings 
about her life. She told an interviewer 
that Dear Life, her 14th collection, would be 
[85] her last. She issued several compilations of 
previously published material, 
including Selected Stories (1996) and Family 
Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-
2014 (2014). 

[90]    Munro’s short story about the 
domestic erosions of Alzheimer disease, “The 
Bear Came over the Mountain,” originally 
published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, 
Loveship, Marriage (2001), was made into the 
[95] critically acclaimed film Away from Her (2006), 
directed by Sarah Polley and starring Julie 
Christie and Gordon Pinsent with Michael 
Murphy and Olympia Dukakis. Other 
film adaptations of Munro’s work 
[100] include Hateship Loveship (2013), which was 
based on the title story of her 2001 collection, 
and Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016), a mystery-
drama inspired by several stories in Runaway. 

    With the exception of Canadian-born 
[105] American author Saul Bellow (who won the 
prize in 1976), Munro was the first Canadian—
 as well as the 13th woman—to be named the 
Nobel literature laureate. 

Adapted from: https://www.britannica.com

                   Alice Munro

[1]     Alice Munro (born July 10, 1931, 
Wingham, Ontario, Canada—died May 13, 
2024, Port Hope, Ontario) was a Canadian 
short-story writer who gained international 
[5] recognition with her exquisitely drawn 
narratives. The Swedish Academy dubbed her a 
“master of the contemporary short story” 
when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for 
Literature in 2013. Munro’s work is noted for 
[10] its precise imagery and narrative style, which is

at once lyrical, compelling, economical, and 
intense, revealing the depth and complexities 
in the emotional lives of everyday people. 

    Munro was raised on what she called 
[15] “this collapsing enterprise of 
a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most 
disreputable part of town.” Her mother, a 
teacher, played a significant role in her life, as 
did her great-aunt and her grandmother. She 
[20] attended the University of Western Ontario but 
left after two years of studying English and 
journalism. At age 20, in 1951, she married her 
first husband, James Munro, and moved 
to Vancouver. She moved again in 1963, 
[25] to Victoria, where the couple started a 
bookstore and together raised three daughters. 
After her first marriage ended in 1972, she 
returned to Ontario and settled in Clinton, near 
her childhood home, where she lived with her 
[30] second husband (married 1976). 

    Munro had begun writing stories as a 
teenager, and she persevered in her attempt to 
establish herself as a writer despite years of 
rejection from publishers and the limitations 
[35] imposed on her career by the responsibilities 
of marriage and motherhood. Her first 
collection of stories was published as Dance of 
the Happy Shades (1968). It is one of three of 
her collections—the other two being Who Do 
[40] You Think You Are? (1978; also published 
as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose) 
and The Progress of Love (1986)—awarded the 
annual Governor General’s Literary Award for 
fiction. Lives of Girls and Women (1971) was 
[45] conceived as a novel but developed into a 
series of interrelated coming-of-age stories. 
Like much of her fiction, the tales capture the 
social and cultural milieu of her native 
southwestern Ontario. Munro embraced the 
[50] mystery, intimacy, and tension of the ordinary 
lives of both men and women, rooted in the 
uncharted and ambivalent landscape of what 
affectionately came to be known as “Munro 
country.” 

[55]    Her later volumes include Something 
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The 
Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My 
Youth (1990), A Wilderness Station (1994), 
and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The 
[60] latter volume received 
both Canada’s esteemed Giller Prize (later the 
Scotiabank Giller Prize) and the National Book 
Critics Circle Award in the U.S. Her book Open 
Secrets (1994) contains stories that range in 
[65] setting from the semicivilized hills of southern 
Ontario to the mountains of Albania. 
In Runaway (2004) Munro explores the depths

of ordinary lives through the use of temporal 
shifts and realistically rendered reminiscences; 
[70] it also was awarded the Giller Prize. The View 
from Castle Rock (2007) combines history, 
family memoir, and fiction into narratives of 
questionable inquiries and obscure replies. In 
2009 Munro won the Man Booker International 
[75] Prize; that same year she published the short
story collection Too Much Happiness. 

    Like much of her oeuvre, the stories 
in Dear Life (2012) were unified by 
examinations of sex, love, and death. Four of 
[80] the stories in the collection were explicitly 
framed as fictionalized autobiography meant 
to encapsulate the aging Munro’s feelings 
about her life. She told an interviewer 
that Dear Life, her 14th collection, would be 
[85] her last. She issued several compilations of 
previously published material, 
including Selected Stories (1996) and Family 
Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-
2014 (2014). 

[90]    Munro’s short story about the 
domestic erosions of Alzheimer disease, “The 
Bear Came over the Mountain,” originally 
published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, 
Loveship, Marriage (2001), was made into the 
[95] critically acclaimed film Away from Her (2006), 
directed by Sarah Polley and starring Julie 
Christie and Gordon Pinsent with Michael 
Murphy and Olympia Dukakis. Other 
film adaptations of Munro’s work 
[100] include Hateship Loveship (2013), which was 
based on the title story of her 2001 collection, 
and Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016), a mystery-
drama inspired by several stories in Runaway. 

    With the exception of Canadian-born 
[105] American author Saul Bellow (who won the 
prize in 1976), Munro was the first Canadian—
 as well as the 13th woman—to be named the 
Nobel literature laureate. 

Adapted from: https://www.britannica.com

                   Alice Munro

[1]     Alice Munro (born July 10, 1931, 
Wingham, Ontario, Canada—died May 13, 
2024, Port Hope, Ontario) was a Canadian 
short-story writer who gained international 
[5] recognition with her exquisitely drawn 
narratives. The Swedish Academy dubbed her a 
“master of the contemporary short story” 
when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for 
Literature in 2013. Munro’s work is noted for 
[10] its precise imagery and narrative style, which is

at once lyrical, compelling, economical, and 
intense, revealing the depth and complexities 
in the emotional lives of everyday people. 

    Munro was raised on what she called 
[15] “this collapsing enterprise of 
a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most 
disreputable part of town.” Her mother, a 
teacher, played a significant role in her life, as 
did her great-aunt and her grandmother. She 
[20] attended the University of Western Ontario but 
left after two years of studying English and 
journalism. At age 20, in 1951, she married her 
first husband, James Munro, and moved 
to Vancouver. She moved again in 1963, 
[25] to Victoria, where the couple started a 
bookstore and together raised three daughters. 
After her first marriage ended in 1972, she 
returned to Ontario and settled in Clinton, near 
her childhood home, where she lived with her 
[30] second husband (married 1976). 

    Munro had begun writing stories as a 
teenager, and she persevered in her attempt to 
establish herself as a writer despite years of 
rejection from publishers and the limitations 
[35] imposed on her career by the responsibilities 
of marriage and motherhood. Her first 
collection of stories was published as Dance of 
the Happy Shades (1968). It is one of three of 
her collections—the other two being Who Do 
[40] You Think You Are? (1978; also published 
as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose) 
and The Progress of Love (1986)—awarded the 
annual Governor General’s Literary Award for 
fiction. Lives of Girls and Women (1971) was 
[45] conceived as a novel but developed into a 
series of interrelated coming-of-age stories. 
Like much of her fiction, the tales capture the 
social and cultural milieu of her native 
southwestern Ontario. Munro embraced the 
[50] mystery, intimacy, and tension of the ordinary 
lives of both men and women, rooted in the 
uncharted and ambivalent landscape of what 
affectionately came to be known as “Munro 
country.” 

[55]    Her later volumes include Something 
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The 
Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My 
Youth (1990), A Wilderness Station (1994), 
and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The 
[60] latter volume received 
both Canada’s esteemed Giller Prize (later the 
Scotiabank Giller Prize) and the National Book 
Critics Circle Award in the U.S. Her book Open 
Secrets (1994) contains stories that range in 
[65] setting from the semicivilized hills of southern 
Ontario to the mountains of Albania. 
In Runaway (2004) Munro explores the depths

of ordinary lives through the use of temporal 
shifts and realistically rendered reminiscences; 
[70] it also was awarded the Giller Prize. The View 
from Castle Rock (2007) combines history, 
family memoir, and fiction into narratives of 
questionable inquiries and obscure replies. In 
2009 Munro won the Man Booker International 
[75] Prize; that same year she published the short
story collection Too Much Happiness. 

    Like much of her oeuvre, the stories 
in Dear Life (2012) were unified by 
examinations of sex, love, and death. Four of 
[80] the stories in the collection were explicitly 
framed as fictionalized autobiography meant 
to encapsulate the aging Munro’s feelings 
about her life. She told an interviewer 
that Dear Life, her 14th collection, would be 
[85] her last. She issued several compilations of 
previously published material, 
including Selected Stories (1996) and Family 
Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-
2014 (2014). 

[90]    Munro’s short story about the 
domestic erosions of Alzheimer disease, “The 
Bear Came over the Mountain,” originally 
published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, 
Loveship, Marriage (2001), was made into the 
[95] critically acclaimed film Away from Her (2006), 
directed by Sarah Polley and starring Julie 
Christie and Gordon Pinsent with Michael 
Murphy and Olympia Dukakis. Other 
film adaptations of Munro’s work 
[100] include Hateship Loveship (2013), which was 
based on the title story of her 2001 collection, 
and Almodóvar’s Julieta (2016), a mystery-
drama inspired by several stories in Runaway. 

    With the exception of Canadian-born 
[105] American author Saul Bellow (who won the 
prize in 1976), Munro was the first Canadian—
 as well as the 13th woman—to be named the 
Nobel literature laureate. 

Adapted from: https://www.britannica.com

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025

Seize the day – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway at 100

[1]    Mrs Dalloway is explicitly quotidian. It follows 
ordinary people through ordinary activities on an 
ordinary day – shopping, walking in the park, riding the 
bus, going to appointments, mending a dress. As Woolf’s 
[5] characters go about their day, scenes and impressions are 
filtered through their individual consciousnesses, 
threaded together with language, images and memories.

    The novel opens with the famous line “Mrs 
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, a 
[10] sentence remarkable for its banality, as well as for its 
commitment to the in medias res plunge into life that 
Woolf was so keen on. The iconic status of the line is 
demonstrated by the number of online parodies it 
inspires, perhaps only surpassed by William Carlos 
[15] Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say, which has become a 
verified meme. 

    On Good Friday 1924, Woolf wrote on a page of 
the manuscript she was drafting – then called The Hours

– that “I will write whatever I want to write.” She could 
[20] write whatever she wanted to write because she owned 
her own publishing house, The Hogarth Press. The actual 
press was in the basement of her suburban Richmond 
home. 

    Mrs Dalloway was the second of Woolf’s novels to 
[25] be self-published in this way. Being a small-press 
publisher allowed her to experiment formally in ways that 
would have been impossible if she was working with a 
mainstream publisher. In A Writer’s Diary, she describes 
her process as both exploratory and technical. On August 
[30] 30, 1923, she wrote: “I dig out beautiful caves behind my 
characters”. Later, in October 1924: “I practise writing; do 
my scales”. 

    Despite Woolf’s refusal to compromise with 
mainstream tastes, Mrs Dalloway was well received. Her 
[35] contemporaries recognised the novel’s importance 
immediately. “An intellectual triumph”, proclaimed P.C. 
Kennedy in the New Statesman; “a cathedral”, 
pronounced E.M. Forster in the New Criterion. It sold 
moderately well: 1,500 copies within about a month of its 
[40] publication on May 14 – more than her prior novel, 
Jacob’s Room, had sold in a year.  

    Woolf’s novel was revolutionary for its depiction of 
same-sex attraction and mental illness, as well as for its 
challenge to the novel form and representation of time. 
[45] Septimus, so capable as a soldier in the Great War, buries 
the trauma of seeing his commanding officer Evans killed, 
only to have it resurface in visual and aural hallucinations, 
of Evans behind the trees, and birds singing in Greek. He 
perceives, as Clarissa does, the burden of the past upon 
[50] the present, and he suffers as a result of the coercion of 
the social system. 

    “In this book I have almost too many ideas,” Woolf 
wrote in her diary on June 19, 1923. “I want to give life 
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the 
[55] social system, and to show it at work, at its most 
intense.” Woolf’s ideas have inspired scores of 
interpretations, focusing on time, space, reality, 
psychology, domesticity, history, sexual relations, politics, 
fashion, the environment, health and illness. She is now 
[60] probably the most written-about 20th century English 
author. I can remember vividly first reading this novel as 
an undergraduate, after which I devoured Woolf’s 
revolutionary 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, which 
criticised the educational, economic and social 
[65] constraints that prevented women, in many instances, 
from writing anything at all. 

    Woolf, of course, could and did write. This was a 
function, as she knew, of her financial and class privilege. 
In her fiction, she modelled a method of writing that 
[70] critiques patriarchal thinking. She focuses our attention 
on overlooked individuals and their inner lives, and she 
splendidly undoes the Victorian conception of plot. Woolf 
writes of the past emerging into the present day and the 
present’s capacity to reshape the past. In her diary, she 
[75] called this her “tunnelling process”. In tunnelling through 
narrative, Woolf flung out a lot of what seems to be dust

– buying flowers, ogling girls, table manners and weight 
gain, advertising, letter writing, doctor’s appointments, 
eating eclairs in a department store cafe. The novel 
[80] reminds us of these moments’ triviality, and their 
significance, through repeated reference to the bells and 
clocks of London striking the hour. 

    This is why the opening line – and the novel as a 
whole – is so remarkable. It catches drops of shimmering 
[85] reality from moments that can so easily go unremarked. 
This, Woolf knew, was what writing needed to do: to stop 
time.  Her metaphor shows that Woolf’s thinking about 
time also had a spatial dimension. These two dimensions 
of space and time structure Mrs Dalloway’s theme and 
[90] method, As David Daiches explained in his 1939 book The 
Novel and the Modern World, Woolf first links a series of 
different perspectives through a single shared moment in 
time – marked by the sound of the bells – then switches 
to an individual perspective, anchored in space, and 
[95] moves through that individual’s memories. 

    Since its publication, Mrs Dalloway has continued 
to inspire. Since the 1970s, she has enjoyed an 
unparalleled position in the history of 20th century 
letters. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Robin 
[100] Lippincott’s Mr Dalloway and John Lanchester’s Mr 
Phillips all appeared in the three years between 1998 and 
2000, all of them reflecting Woolf’s legacy, tacitly or 
explicitly. Because of the Oscar-winning film adaptation 
by Stephen Daldry, Cunningham’s novel is the most 
[105] recognisable of these three. The Hours revises Mrs 
Dalloway through the stories of three women: Virginia 
Woolf herself; Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who 
reads Mrs Dalloway; and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed 
Mrs Dalloway by her former lover Richard, for whom she 
[110] throws a literary party.

    Mrs Dalloway shows us the ways that words can 
both connect and sever. Characters pass each other on 
the street, muse on a shared past, or witness the same 
event from different vantage points and through different 
[115] filters of personality and psyche. As Hermione Lee 
explained, for Woolf “the really important life was 
‘within’”. 

Adapted from: https://theconversation/jan.30.2025