1 00:00:02,340 --> 00:00:04,380 CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC 2 00:00:11,100 --> 00:00:16,100 In 1917, as the First World War raged in France, 3 00:00:16,100 --> 00:00:18,620 the writer Virginia Woolf took her daily walk 4 00:00:18,620 --> 00:00:20,460 across the Sussex countryside. 5 00:00:24,780 --> 00:00:27,540 Although a long way from the conflict, 6 00:00:27,540 --> 00:00:30,860 she could hear guns echoing across the English Channel - 7 00:00:30,860 --> 00:00:33,860 and reports from the front line affected her deeply. 8 00:00:38,780 --> 00:00:40,660 For the rest of her life, 9 00:00:40,660 --> 00:00:44,420 she would look for ways of writing about this violence and breakage. 10 00:00:50,100 --> 00:00:53,820 Virginia Woolf came of age as a writer at a strange time - 11 00:00:53,820 --> 00:00:56,980 when Europe was so shaken it barely knew itself. 12 00:00:58,060 --> 00:01:02,700 In these uncertain years, the Victorian novel, with its firm 13 00:01:02,700 --> 00:01:06,860 plots and knowable characters seemed out of place. 14 00:01:06,860 --> 00:01:09,700 Woolf sensed the need for change. 15 00:01:09,700 --> 00:01:11,860 Everything was going to be new, 16 00:01:11,860 --> 00:01:14,140 everything was going to be different. 17 00:01:14,140 --> 00:01:15,820 Everything was on trial. 18 00:01:22,220 --> 00:01:26,820 Dividing her writing life between this quiet stretch of Sussex 19 00:01:26,820 --> 00:01:30,540 and a home in London, Virginia Woolf would play a leading role 20 00:01:30,540 --> 00:01:32,380 in a literary revolution. 21 00:01:36,820 --> 00:01:40,300 Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, 22 00:01:40,300 --> 00:01:44,380 would help change our thinking about what a novel could be 23 00:01:44,380 --> 00:01:45,980 and how it could be written. 24 00:01:49,020 --> 00:01:53,340 In writing this book, Woolf would tackle subjects close to her heart. 25 00:01:57,260 --> 00:02:01,620 Reading her manuscripts and diaries, I'm going to follow her 26 00:02:01,620 --> 00:02:05,300 through the ups and downs of the creative process 27 00:02:05,300 --> 00:02:08,940 and catch a glimpse of a great writer at work 28 00:02:08,940 --> 00:02:11,340 as she brings a radical new novel to life. 29 00:02:36,620 --> 00:02:41,060 "Big Ben strikes. First a warning, musical; 30 00:02:41,060 --> 00:02:43,700 "then the hour, irrevocable. 31 00:02:43,700 --> 00:02:46,860 "The leaden circles dissolved in the air. 32 00:02:48,460 --> 00:02:50,100 "In people's eyes, 33 00:02:50,100 --> 00:02:55,420 "in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; 34 00:02:55,420 --> 00:02:59,700 "the carriages, motor cars, sandwich men shuffling and swinging. 35 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:05,460 "This was what she loved - life; London; this moment of June." 36 00:03:07,260 --> 00:03:11,460 When Virginia Woolf started to write Mrs Dalloway in 1922, 37 00:03:11,460 --> 00:03:14,740 she was already a respected writer and reviewer. 38 00:03:14,740 --> 00:03:17,860 But she sensed that this was going to be her "high summer", 39 00:03:17,860 --> 00:03:19,860 this was her moment. 40 00:03:19,860 --> 00:03:22,300 If she was going to make a mark on the literary world, 41 00:03:22,300 --> 00:03:23,660 it had to be now. 42 00:03:26,500 --> 00:03:31,300 The story unfolds over the course of a single day in London. 43 00:03:31,300 --> 00:03:35,020 It dips in and out of many different lives 44 00:03:35,020 --> 00:03:37,500 but focuses on two people in particular. 45 00:03:38,700 --> 00:03:42,620 Part of Woolf's audacity is that these people never meet. 46 00:03:44,340 --> 00:03:46,340 There's Clarissa Dalloway, 47 00:03:46,340 --> 00:03:49,700 a society hostess, the wife of a Conservative MP, 48 00:03:49,700 --> 00:03:53,980 and she's going to be throwing a lavish party in the evening. 49 00:03:53,980 --> 00:03:56,420 And then there's Septimus Warren Smith. 50 00:03:56,420 --> 00:04:00,620 A shell-shocked soldier, whose honourable military career 51 00:04:00,620 --> 00:04:03,340 is about to come to a tragic end. 52 00:04:03,340 --> 00:04:05,300 BIG BEN CHIMES 53 00:04:05,300 --> 00:04:08,940 The regular chimes of Big Ben punctuate the novel, 54 00:04:08,940 --> 00:04:11,100 ringing out across the city, 55 00:04:11,100 --> 00:04:15,500 linking disparate people as they pause to register the time. 56 00:04:17,500 --> 00:04:18,740 Now, it must be said 57 00:04:18,740 --> 00:04:22,340 that the plot of this novel doesn't sound very promising. 58 00:04:22,340 --> 00:04:25,460 A man walks around London - a woman prepares for a party 59 00:04:25,460 --> 00:04:28,060 and receives a visit from someone she didn't marry. 60 00:04:28,060 --> 00:04:29,380 Time passes. 61 00:04:30,500 --> 00:04:34,500 But what makes Mrs Dalloway so inventive isn't the plot itself - 62 00:04:34,500 --> 00:04:36,780 but the way that it's written - 63 00:04:36,780 --> 00:04:39,580 and the way that all the different strands of it relate. 64 00:04:41,140 --> 00:04:43,100 Parallel stories, 65 00:04:43,100 --> 00:04:47,580 parallel lives. Linked only by a web of associations. 66 00:04:49,540 --> 00:04:54,500 Mrs Dalloway would be a risk but it echoed the mood of the times. 67 00:04:56,900 --> 00:05:00,380 Britain had emerged from the First World War a damaged nation. 68 00:05:05,220 --> 00:05:08,420 The term "shell shock" first appeared in newspaper reports 69 00:05:08,420 --> 00:05:12,220 in 1922, the year Virginia Woolf began Mrs Dalloway. 70 00:05:15,300 --> 00:05:18,580 It resonated with what she already knew - 71 00:05:18,580 --> 00:05:20,420 that the past is always 72 00:05:20,420 --> 00:05:26,860 with us, that memory persists, that something fundamental had changed, 73 00:05:26,860 --> 00:05:31,060 something that could not be healed by victory parades and bunting. 74 00:05:34,140 --> 00:05:36,980 So, at this very tense time in the early 1920s, 75 00:05:36,980 --> 00:05:40,620 it feels like all society is facing, in a way, two directions, 76 00:05:40,620 --> 00:05:43,340 thinking back over the war, looking ahead. 77 00:05:43,340 --> 00:05:48,300 This is a time when several writers, of whom Woolf's one, 78 00:05:48,300 --> 00:05:50,300 are very self-consciously 79 00:05:50,300 --> 00:05:53,820 experimenting with new kinds of writing which are supposed to be, 80 00:05:53,820 --> 00:05:56,980 sort of, adequate to a new modern world, 81 00:05:56,980 --> 00:05:59,700 and doing so in quite a rivalrous way. 82 00:05:59,700 --> 00:06:02,140 How much was she in conscious competition, then, 83 00:06:02,140 --> 00:06:03,900 with other writers, do you think? 84 00:06:03,900 --> 00:06:07,060 She herself, if you read her letters, was quite, sort of, 85 00:06:07,060 --> 00:06:10,700 unsettled by the experiments of the other, 86 00:06:10,700 --> 00:06:13,060 sort of, great modernist writers of the period. 87 00:06:13,060 --> 00:06:16,300 So, TS Eliot is coming round, reading The Waste Land aloud. 88 00:06:16,300 --> 00:06:18,580 I mean, that must have felt quite a challenge. 89 00:06:18,580 --> 00:06:20,620 Yeah, you might think it was a privilege. 90 00:06:20,620 --> 00:06:22,260 But I think it's a bit scary, too! 91 00:06:22,260 --> 00:06:24,340 So what did she do differently, then? 92 00:06:24,340 --> 00:06:29,060 Well, I think what she tried to do, in fiction, was to find 93 00:06:29,060 --> 00:06:32,780 a form for the novel which was true, really, to the way people thought 94 00:06:32,780 --> 00:06:35,260 rather than what they did or what they said. 95 00:06:35,260 --> 00:06:40,540 It's an extraordinary, sort of, map of internal plots 96 00:06:40,540 --> 00:06:43,300 and people's dialogues with themselves, 97 00:06:43,300 --> 00:06:46,260 rather than what's going on in the exterior world. 98 00:06:52,300 --> 00:06:57,940 "She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. 99 00:06:57,940 --> 00:07:00,620 "She sliced like a knife through everything, 100 00:07:00,620 --> 00:07:03,660 "at the same time was outside looking on. 101 00:07:05,300 --> 00:07:10,980 "She had a perpetual sense of being out, far out to sea and alone." 102 00:07:14,340 --> 00:07:19,980 There's a powerful sense of feelings throttled and of lives disappointed. 103 00:07:19,980 --> 00:07:23,700 It's partly about the way the English stiff upper lip... 104 00:07:23,700 --> 00:07:26,660 Totally. ..has affected our internal emotional lives. Totally. 105 00:07:26,660 --> 00:07:29,580 And the stiff upper-lipness of it, I think, is really conscious. 106 00:07:29,580 --> 00:07:32,180 There's an extraordinary bit near the beginning of the novel where 107 00:07:32,180 --> 00:07:36,180 Clarissa Dalloway is thinking about the war, 108 00:07:36,180 --> 00:07:38,580 when she remembers Lady Bexborough 109 00:07:38,580 --> 00:07:43,700 who opened a bazaar with a telegram in her hand, "they said." 110 00:07:43,700 --> 00:07:47,300 And "they said" brilliantly lets you see that Lady Bexborough 111 00:07:47,300 --> 00:07:50,020 is almost admired for the fact that the telegram, 112 00:07:50,020 --> 00:07:53,540 which tells that her son has died, he's been killed in the war, 113 00:07:53,540 --> 00:07:56,980 doesn't stop her doing her duty of opening the bazaar. Carrying on. 114 00:07:56,980 --> 00:07:58,260 Yes. Yes. 115 00:07:58,260 --> 00:08:02,500 And that seems such a, sort of, unflinching image of, 116 00:08:02,500 --> 00:08:07,180 kind of, how feeling is controlled and conquered in the novel. 117 00:08:20,260 --> 00:08:23,820 "Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, 118 00:08:23,820 --> 00:08:27,660 "the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, 119 00:08:27,660 --> 00:08:32,340 "counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out 120 00:08:32,340 --> 00:08:36,700 "in a chorus the supreme advantages of having a sense of proportion." 121 00:08:38,900 --> 00:08:41,620 By setting her novel on a single day 122 00:08:41,620 --> 00:08:45,460 punctuated by the chimes of Big Ben on the hour, 123 00:08:45,460 --> 00:08:48,460 Woolf was giving herself a definite framework, 124 00:08:48,460 --> 00:08:51,900 a solid shape and structure within which she could deal 125 00:08:51,900 --> 00:08:55,780 with some very difficult things, not only the trauma of war, 126 00:08:55,780 --> 00:09:00,340 but, also, some of her own hardest and least containable experiences. 127 00:09:06,620 --> 00:09:11,140 While Clarissa Dalloway rejoices in London life, 128 00:09:11,140 --> 00:09:15,060 Septimus sees the city very differently. 129 00:09:15,060 --> 00:09:19,740 A busy street becomes a nightmarish visions of the trenches. 130 00:09:19,740 --> 00:09:23,740 There are men trapped in mines, women burned alive 131 00:09:23,740 --> 00:09:27,500 and brutality blaring out on placards. 132 00:09:29,660 --> 00:09:34,660 In writing Septimus, Virginia Woolf was drawing on personal experience. 133 00:09:36,980 --> 00:09:42,740 Woolf had a breakdown aged 13, following the death of her mother. 134 00:09:42,740 --> 00:09:46,460 And episodes of mental illness would recur for the rest of her life. 135 00:09:47,940 --> 00:09:52,660 At times she was bedridden, plagued by voices and hallucinations. 136 00:09:56,500 --> 00:09:59,340 Virginia Woolf saw many doctors in the course of her life, 137 00:09:59,340 --> 00:10:01,900 so she was well aware of how the medical profession 138 00:10:01,900 --> 00:10:05,980 struggled to understand and treat mental illness. 139 00:10:05,980 --> 00:10:09,100 In the passages where Septimus is being examined by experts, 140 00:10:09,100 --> 00:10:12,580 you can really feel her own frustration coming through. 141 00:10:12,580 --> 00:10:16,660 "When he felt like that, he went to the Music Hall, said Dr Holmes. 142 00:10:16,660 --> 00:10:19,540 "He took a day off with his wife and played golf. 143 00:10:19,540 --> 00:10:24,700 " 'Why not try two tablets of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime?' 144 00:10:24,700 --> 00:10:27,620 "No, there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter." 145 00:10:28,900 --> 00:10:31,380 BIG BEN CHIMES 146 00:10:34,540 --> 00:10:37,420 Woolf wrote into the character of Septimus 147 00:10:37,420 --> 00:10:39,820 some of her own disturbing episodes, 148 00:10:39,820 --> 00:10:42,980 merging her private illness with a public story 149 00:10:42,980 --> 00:10:46,420 and taking control of her experience by writing about it. 150 00:11:03,780 --> 00:11:08,660 Virginia Woolf was torn between the infectious vivacity of London 151 00:11:08,660 --> 00:11:11,300 and her desire for solitude and space. 152 00:11:13,420 --> 00:11:16,540 At Monk's House, in Rodmell, East Sussex, 153 00:11:16,540 --> 00:11:18,420 she found an antidote to the city. 154 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:26,860 When she was at Monk's House, work happened here - 155 00:11:26,860 --> 00:11:28,860 in a shed at the bottom of the garden. 156 00:11:31,660 --> 00:11:34,820 For her, writing was an addiction. 157 00:11:34,820 --> 00:11:38,500 She took to it, she once said, "as some people do to gin." 158 00:11:42,340 --> 00:11:46,460 Woolf took great joy in a well-organised day. 159 00:11:46,460 --> 00:11:50,340 From ten until one was her inviolable time for writing. 160 00:11:50,340 --> 00:11:52,860 She'd tune-up first with a cigarette 161 00:11:52,860 --> 00:11:55,220 and then think through the first words. 162 00:11:55,220 --> 00:11:58,620 In the afternoon she'd often go for a walk, sometimes miles 163 00:11:58,620 --> 00:12:02,300 and miles, saying over to herself the sentences she'd been writing 164 00:12:02,300 --> 00:12:06,660 that morning, letting the rhythm of them fall in tune with her step. 165 00:12:06,660 --> 00:12:10,540 And then, in the evening, there would be immersive reading, 166 00:12:10,540 --> 00:12:13,260 perhaps literature or history. 167 00:12:13,260 --> 00:12:17,100 And some image or tempo from Shakespeare might start 168 00:12:17,100 --> 00:12:19,500 the tune for the next morning's writing. 169 00:12:23,140 --> 00:12:25,380 As a publisher and reviewer, 170 00:12:25,380 --> 00:12:28,900 Woolf was well aware of new work by other contemporary writers. 171 00:12:31,020 --> 00:12:35,340 Setting Mrs Dalloway over the course of a single day in a city 172 00:12:35,340 --> 00:12:39,740 was a riposte to James Joyce, whose epic novel, Ulysses, 173 00:12:39,740 --> 00:12:43,060 charts a day in the life of two men in Dublin. 174 00:12:47,620 --> 00:12:52,060 Woolf read and wrote about Joyce's novel in 1922, 175 00:12:52,060 --> 00:12:55,220 just when the first ideas were forming for Mrs Dalloway. 176 00:12:55,220 --> 00:12:57,380 And she was certainly intrigued by it. 177 00:12:57,380 --> 00:12:59,780 She acknowledged Joyce's brilliance. 178 00:12:59,780 --> 00:13:03,020 She couldn't help feeling it was rather pretentious. 179 00:13:03,020 --> 00:13:06,820 She wrote frankly in her diary that she was about as irritated 180 00:13:06,820 --> 00:13:10,700 by it as by "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." 181 00:13:13,500 --> 00:13:17,420 But she knew that, like Joyce, she was attempting something new 182 00:13:17,420 --> 00:13:20,300 and with all innovations there are risks. 183 00:13:26,820 --> 00:13:30,260 In a diary entry for June 1923, 184 00:13:30,260 --> 00:13:33,300 Virginia Woolf reflected on the progress of her novel. 185 00:13:36,500 --> 00:13:39,940 "I foresee this is going to be the devil of a struggle. 186 00:13:39,940 --> 00:13:43,180 "The design is so queer and so masterful. 187 00:13:43,180 --> 00:13:46,540 "It is certainly original and interests me hugely." 188 00:13:51,340 --> 00:13:53,820 Woolf wrote the first drafts of Mrs Dalloway 189 00:13:53,820 --> 00:13:58,260 in three large notebooks, now held here, at the British Library. 190 00:14:02,540 --> 00:14:07,140 To turn the pages is about as close as we can get to witnessing 191 00:14:07,140 --> 00:14:09,380 a great novel taking shape. 192 00:14:14,740 --> 00:14:18,180 One of the striking things, actually, is the book itself. 193 00:14:19,620 --> 00:14:23,260 I do my writing on, you know, pre-produced A4 pads. 194 00:14:23,260 --> 00:14:26,220 But Virginia Woolf loved the feel of books 195 00:14:26,220 --> 00:14:28,940 so she always hand bound her notebooks. 196 00:14:28,940 --> 00:14:32,580 There's a wonderful sense of the, the book as an object. 197 00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:34,980 And, of course, Virginia Woolf was a bookmaker, 198 00:14:34,980 --> 00:14:37,780 running a press with her husband, Leonard. 199 00:14:37,780 --> 00:14:40,180 She knew about the feel of books 200 00:14:40,180 --> 00:14:43,500 and she wanted to write her own in good notebooks. 201 00:14:45,500 --> 00:14:49,060 The first page - "The Hours?" 202 00:14:49,060 --> 00:14:53,340 And The Hours stayed in her mind as the title of this book. 203 00:14:53,340 --> 00:14:57,180 She kept swapping between The Hours and Mrs Dalloway, 204 00:14:57,180 --> 00:15:00,980 as if she's wondering whether the central thing here is to do 205 00:15:00,980 --> 00:15:05,380 with the passing of time, across a whole city, a whole nation, 206 00:15:05,380 --> 00:15:09,700 or whether it's actually this one woman and how everything else 207 00:15:09,700 --> 00:15:13,340 is going to impinge on her personal, private, emotional life. 208 00:15:24,300 --> 00:15:28,300 This is...recognizably Mrs Dalloway, 209 00:15:28,300 --> 00:15:30,900 but not quite as we know it. 210 00:15:30,900 --> 00:15:35,540 She starts rather solemnly, with a procession of young boys, 211 00:15:35,540 --> 00:15:37,900 the sons of dead officers, 212 00:15:37,900 --> 00:15:41,140 coming away from laying wreaths at the Cenotaph. 213 00:15:41,140 --> 00:15:42,860 The mood is very sombre. 214 00:15:44,100 --> 00:15:47,500 "Silence falls on London and falls on the mind. 215 00:15:48,580 --> 00:15:51,100 "Time flaps at the mast." 216 00:15:52,420 --> 00:15:58,380 And, of course, we know that later Woolf decided to begin instead 217 00:15:58,380 --> 00:16:03,220 with Clarissa, going out into the June morning to hold back 218 00:16:03,220 --> 00:16:06,940 that feeling of war for later, to come at it, I think, 219 00:16:06,940 --> 00:16:09,940 more obliquely and all the more powerfully for that. 220 00:16:19,940 --> 00:16:24,780 It's so exciting to see Woolf's pen just dashing across the page. 221 00:16:24,780 --> 00:16:27,580 You can see the places where she clearly knows exactly what 222 00:16:27,580 --> 00:16:29,380 she wants to say. 223 00:16:29,380 --> 00:16:33,660 And then there are pauses and crossings out, hesitations. 224 00:16:35,060 --> 00:16:36,380 In a sense, actually, 225 00:16:36,380 --> 00:16:39,420 this manuscript is like another sort of diary 226 00:16:39,420 --> 00:16:43,540 because she's marking the date in the margin so we can see 227 00:16:43,540 --> 00:16:47,660 almost day-by-day what she's thinking and what she's writing. 228 00:16:50,620 --> 00:16:54,540 Do you know, we've even got a quick pencil sketch of a floor plan 229 00:16:54,540 --> 00:16:56,820 for one of the houses that Virginia Woolf is 230 00:16:56,820 --> 00:16:58,860 thinking of renting in London. 231 00:17:00,300 --> 00:17:03,580 The wonderful sense of the rest of her life going on at the same 232 00:17:03,580 --> 00:17:05,460 time as trying to write this book. 233 00:17:07,740 --> 00:17:11,260 I think we can see, particularly, actually, that the 234 00:17:11,260 --> 00:17:16,380 passages with Septimus are really heavily worked, particularly 235 00:17:16,380 --> 00:17:19,780 those places where Septimus is having his hallucinations, 236 00:17:19,780 --> 00:17:23,020 where he's going to Harley Street and seeing the doctors. 237 00:17:23,020 --> 00:17:28,300 You can see the hesitations, lots and lots of different versions. 238 00:17:28,300 --> 00:17:33,380 Sometimes during the periods of her illness, she wasn't able to write. 239 00:17:33,380 --> 00:17:38,500 I think we get a feeling for two battles going on at once here - 240 00:17:38,500 --> 00:17:42,100 Woolf's working at her limits as a writer, 241 00:17:42,100 --> 00:17:46,660 cajoling all of this disparate material into a new form. 242 00:17:46,660 --> 00:17:51,740 And at the same time, quite inseparably, she's finding 243 00:17:51,740 --> 00:17:54,420 a way of writing about the illness she'd never 244 00:17:54,420 --> 00:17:56,300 written about in this way before. 245 00:18:02,820 --> 00:18:06,620 In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to write about what 246 00:18:06,620 --> 00:18:10,060 she knew, but to bring the whole world into it. 247 00:18:11,420 --> 00:18:15,220 She wanted, she said, "to make people talk about everything in 248 00:18:15,220 --> 00:18:18,380 "the whole of life so that one's hair stands on end 249 00:18:18,380 --> 00:18:19,860 "in a drawing room". 250 00:18:21,100 --> 00:18:22,700 It was quite a challenge. 251 00:18:27,660 --> 00:18:30,660 The central character didn't come easily. 252 00:18:30,660 --> 00:18:35,140 Woolf faltered, she almost abandoned the book in a dismal moment 253 00:18:35,140 --> 00:18:41,100 when Clarissa seemed "too stiff, too glittering and tinselly". 254 00:18:41,100 --> 00:18:46,180 Then she had a breakthrough - she invented Clarissa's memories. 255 00:18:46,180 --> 00:18:48,180 She showed how rapidly, 256 00:18:48,180 --> 00:18:53,180 involuntarily, all kinds of scenes from the past come into mind. 257 00:18:53,180 --> 00:18:57,420 And through those memories we learn about Clarissa's old flame, 258 00:18:57,420 --> 00:18:59,660 Peter Walsh, who's just come back from India 259 00:18:59,660 --> 00:19:02,300 and is coming to her party. 260 00:19:02,300 --> 00:19:06,820 We learn about the mesmerizing Sally Seaton who Clarissa loved 261 00:19:06,820 --> 00:19:08,660 and kissed. 262 00:19:08,660 --> 00:19:12,940 We get a sense of some of her frustration that marriage has 263 00:19:12,940 --> 00:19:17,580 made her Mrs Richard Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more. 264 00:19:17,580 --> 00:19:21,540 We share, I think, some of her yearning for all the lives 265 00:19:21,540 --> 00:19:26,500 she might have led - her wistful reflections on the paths not taken. 266 00:19:32,420 --> 00:19:36,500 Woolf's diaries reveal that the character of Clarissa Dalloway 267 00:19:36,500 --> 00:19:40,580 may have been shaped by the unexpected death of a family friend. 268 00:19:40,580 --> 00:19:43,700 The circumstances were ambiguous - 269 00:19:43,700 --> 00:19:47,660 reports said she had fallen over the banisters. 270 00:19:47,660 --> 00:19:51,940 I wonder how important you think it was that the family friend 271 00:19:51,940 --> 00:19:55,780 of her youth, Kitty Maxse... Yes. ..died just 272 00:19:55,780 --> 00:19:58,780 when she was starting to write Mrs Dalloway? 273 00:19:58,780 --> 00:20:01,860 She was the young woman Virginia Woolf should have been 274 00:20:01,860 --> 00:20:03,100 brought up to be. 275 00:20:03,100 --> 00:20:05,900 She was the young woman her mother had approved of, 276 00:20:05,900 --> 00:20:08,340 who'd made the right kind of marriage. 277 00:20:08,340 --> 00:20:13,180 And had been a sort of model of rectitude and good manners. 278 00:20:13,180 --> 00:20:16,180 But that marriage didn't turn out terribly well. 279 00:20:16,180 --> 00:20:18,820 And I don't think she would have been terribly surprised 280 00:20:18,820 --> 00:20:22,180 if Kitty had somehow fallen... 281 00:20:23,620 --> 00:20:26,860 ..by accident on purpose to her death. 282 00:20:26,860 --> 00:20:31,460 And so that there is a sense of being very close up to death, 283 00:20:31,460 --> 00:20:34,180 that's very important, I think, for the novel. 284 00:20:34,180 --> 00:20:38,540 So, Clarissa is a curious blend of Kitty Maxse, 285 00:20:38,540 --> 00:20:42,900 who Virginia Woolf didn't love, and something of herself. 286 00:20:42,900 --> 00:20:47,700 Virginia Woolf had her own domestic choices to make. 287 00:20:47,700 --> 00:20:54,060 Yes, and she writes one letter when she's 29 to her sister Vanessa Bell. 288 00:20:54,060 --> 00:20:57,740 It's a very depressed letter saying, "to be 29 and unmarried". 289 00:20:57,740 --> 00:21:00,540 And she was, of course, very beautiful... Very beautiful. 290 00:21:00,540 --> 00:21:02,740 ..could have seduced anybody she wanted. 291 00:21:02,740 --> 00:21:05,180 She could have. And then Leonard Woolf came on the scene. 292 00:21:05,180 --> 00:21:08,940 And, I think, she was not in love with him initially. 293 00:21:08,940 --> 00:21:11,700 But she took him very seriously. 294 00:21:11,700 --> 00:21:13,780 This was a man she could marry. 295 00:21:13,780 --> 00:21:16,540 He was not what her family would have expected, 296 00:21:16,540 --> 00:21:18,900 because he was Jewish and he had no money. 297 00:21:18,900 --> 00:21:22,500 So that's what she writes defiantly when she agrees to marry him - 298 00:21:22,500 --> 00:21:26,020 she writes, "I'm going to marry a penniless Jew". 299 00:21:26,020 --> 00:21:28,340 And yet they were together as writers. 300 00:21:28,340 --> 00:21:31,660 And I remember Woolf saying that this marriage would work, 301 00:21:31,660 --> 00:21:34,940 "because he has written a novel and so have I". 302 00:21:34,940 --> 00:21:37,740 And this is how they saw it. 303 00:21:37,740 --> 00:21:39,540 JAUNTY 1920S MUSIC 304 00:21:45,820 --> 00:21:49,020 Virginia Woolf completed her redrafts for Mrs Dalloway 305 00:21:49,020 --> 00:21:53,100 amidst the bustle and breeziness of Bloomsbury. 306 00:21:53,100 --> 00:21:57,340 She revelled in being back at the centre of things with music, 307 00:21:57,340 --> 00:22:01,100 talk and city views once again within her reach. 308 00:22:03,940 --> 00:22:08,060 When Woolf finished the novel, in good health, in October 1924, 309 00:22:08,060 --> 00:22:10,060 she could congratulate herself. 310 00:22:10,060 --> 00:22:12,340 In a sense, it was a triumph over the illness she'd been 311 00:22:12,340 --> 00:22:13,900 writing about. 312 00:22:13,900 --> 00:22:16,260 And she'd even met the deadline she'd punctiliously 313 00:22:16,260 --> 00:22:18,540 set herself six months before. 314 00:22:25,300 --> 00:22:29,580 Big Ben strikes and dusk descends across the city. 315 00:22:29,580 --> 00:22:32,740 There's a sense of magic and carnival in the air. 316 00:22:35,780 --> 00:22:38,980 And, at last, we arrive at Mrs Dalloway's party. 317 00:22:38,980 --> 00:22:41,700 BACKGROUND LAUGHTER 318 00:22:41,700 --> 00:22:44,820 Here, the lives of the society hostess 319 00:22:44,820 --> 00:22:48,540 and the shell-shocked soldier will finally coincide. 320 00:22:55,300 --> 00:22:59,020 The party is a summing up of Clarissa's life. 321 00:22:59,020 --> 00:23:02,860 People she has known across many, many years come together in it. 322 00:23:02,860 --> 00:23:07,100 It's a glittering social occasion filled with everyone who's anyone 323 00:23:07,100 --> 00:23:09,740 in the British Establishment, even the Prime Minister. 324 00:23:13,420 --> 00:23:16,660 Clarissa is in her element, a magnetic presence 325 00:23:16,660 --> 00:23:19,980 at the centre of things, drawing all her guests together. 326 00:23:19,980 --> 00:23:21,940 CHATTER AND LAUGHTER 327 00:23:25,140 --> 00:23:28,820 But the gaiety is interrupted by the news that 328 00:23:28,820 --> 00:23:30,660 "a young man has killed himself". 329 00:23:35,140 --> 00:23:38,980 The shell-shocked Septimus has leapt from his bedroom window 330 00:23:38,980 --> 00:23:42,740 and fallen to his death on the railings below. 331 00:23:42,740 --> 00:23:46,420 Suddenly, in the midst of the party among the life 332 00:23:46,420 --> 00:23:53,500 and the laughter, there is death, shocking, palpable, inescapable. 333 00:23:53,500 --> 00:23:56,780 "Up had flashed the ground, through him, 334 00:23:56,780 --> 00:24:00,140 "blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. 335 00:24:00,140 --> 00:24:04,700 "There he lay, with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, 336 00:24:04,700 --> 00:24:07,260 "and then a suffocation of blackness." 337 00:24:11,780 --> 00:24:14,940 Clarissa steps aside from her party. 338 00:24:14,940 --> 00:24:18,980 She senses something disturbingly familiar in this stranger's death. 339 00:24:26,140 --> 00:24:30,460 Woolf originally intended that Clarissa would kill herself, 340 00:24:30,460 --> 00:24:34,380 or that, perhaps, she would die at the end of her party. 341 00:24:34,380 --> 00:24:37,540 But then she decided to swap things round. 342 00:24:37,540 --> 00:24:42,980 In fact, Septimus would be the one to die and Clarissa would live. 343 00:24:42,980 --> 00:24:46,860 This becomes, then, a novel about Clarissa's survival. 344 00:24:46,860 --> 00:24:51,620 Woolf calls the book, Mrs Dalloway, naming it after the woman who lives. 345 00:24:51,620 --> 00:24:55,380 She makes it, in a sense, a book about a resurrection. 346 00:24:55,380 --> 00:24:59,540 By bringing Clarissa and Septimus together in the final scene, 347 00:24:59,540 --> 00:25:02,940 Woolf delivers a powerful social critique. 348 00:25:02,940 --> 00:25:06,140 The party is full of members of The Establishment - 349 00:25:06,140 --> 00:25:10,300 it's what young men like Septimus fought and died for. 350 00:25:10,300 --> 00:25:14,140 His death is a disaster that belongs to all of us - 351 00:25:14,140 --> 00:25:16,820 it's society's collective disgrace. 352 00:25:21,580 --> 00:25:25,980 Virginia Woolf makes Clarissa walk back into the crowded party. 353 00:25:25,980 --> 00:25:28,500 After all the complexity of the novel, 354 00:25:28,500 --> 00:25:31,340 the last line is as simple as they come. 355 00:25:33,060 --> 00:25:36,020 " 'It is Clarissa'... for there she was." 356 00:25:45,100 --> 00:25:50,660 Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925. 357 00:25:50,660 --> 00:25:55,220 Virginia Woolf could finally hold a copy in her hands - she had done it. 358 00:25:56,940 --> 00:26:02,860 Allowing herself a moment of excitement, she wrote in her diary - 359 00:26:02,860 --> 00:26:06,620 "I wonder if this time, I have achieved something? 360 00:26:06,620 --> 00:26:10,260 "I might have become one of the interesting... 361 00:26:10,260 --> 00:26:14,220 "I will not say great, but interesting novelists." 362 00:26:16,020 --> 00:26:20,420 Mrs Dalloway sold well, outstripping all Woolf's previous publications 363 00:26:20,420 --> 00:26:23,700 and establishing her as a major modern writer. 364 00:26:23,700 --> 00:26:27,340 It paid for the installation of hot water at Rodmell and even for 365 00:26:27,340 --> 00:26:31,700 a loo which was for ever afterwards known as Mrs Dalloway's closet. 366 00:26:31,700 --> 00:26:34,700 But it did much more than that. 367 00:26:34,700 --> 00:26:38,060 As generations read and reread the novel, 368 00:26:38,060 --> 00:26:41,940 they came to appreciate the design more clearly. 369 00:26:41,940 --> 00:26:45,500 They saw the achievement of having written Septimus, 370 00:26:45,500 --> 00:26:50,180 not only as Clarissa's opposite but also, in some ways, as her double. 371 00:26:50,180 --> 00:26:55,260 They saw the audacity of suggesting that Clarissa, the respectable socialite, 372 00:26:55,260 --> 00:26:58,780 also felt very like the young man who had killed himself. 373 00:27:04,060 --> 00:27:07,740 With hindsight there's an inescapable resonance 374 00:27:07,740 --> 00:27:11,660 between the final scene of Mrs Dalloway, and Woolf's own life. 375 00:27:13,260 --> 00:27:18,980 In 1941, Virginia Woolf, aged 59 and one of the greatest writers 376 00:27:18,980 --> 00:27:24,100 of the 20th century, would walk out across the Sussex meadows. 377 00:27:24,100 --> 00:27:26,180 She did not wish to come back. 378 00:27:29,420 --> 00:27:33,860 Her body would be found in the River Ouse three weeks later. 379 00:27:40,860 --> 00:27:43,700 Virginia Woolf's death has become perhaps the most famous 380 00:27:43,700 --> 00:27:45,380 part of her life. 381 00:27:45,380 --> 00:27:48,340 But it's certainly not her greatest legacy. 382 00:27:48,340 --> 00:27:51,940 She found narrative form for all those acrobatic flights 383 00:27:51,940 --> 00:27:56,140 of thought and association that go on in our minds all the time. 384 00:27:56,140 --> 00:27:59,580 She even taught us to read in a new ways, negotiating gaps 385 00:27:59,580 --> 00:28:01,780 and uncertainties. 386 00:28:01,780 --> 00:28:03,340 Looking at the manuscripts, 387 00:28:03,340 --> 00:28:06,620 going back through the diaries, I've got a clearer sense than 388 00:28:06,620 --> 00:28:10,420 ever before of just how bold Woolf was in her writing. 389 00:28:10,420 --> 00:28:14,780 And I really think that these amazing documents give us a powerful 390 00:28:14,780 --> 00:28:18,940 sense of just what it took to write what had never been written before. 391 00:28:26,420 --> 00:28:29,140 I think it would give her great pleasure to know that, 392 00:28:29,140 --> 00:28:30,900 almost a century on, 393 00:28:30,900 --> 00:28:34,380 we are still captivated by her vision of life, 394 00:28:34,380 --> 00:28:36,900 London, this moment of June. 395 00:28:43,340 --> 00:28:46,260 To dig deeper into Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway 396 00:28:46,260 --> 00:28:49,500 and the other books in this series a free App from 397 00:28:49,500 --> 00:28:52,460 The Open University is available to download. 398 00:28:52,460 --> 00:28:54,460 Go to... 399 00:28:57,300 --> 00:28:59,740 And follow the links to The Open University.