The Secret Story Behind Mrs Dalloway

[Music] [Music] mrs. Dalloway said mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself I think I'll buy the flowers myself hey everyone I'm Eric from Lonesome reader and if you've seen my videos before you know that I'm a huge fan of Virginia Woolf so I need to share with you today a very exciting new book which is Justin published and it's made me think about her novel mrs. Dalloway in a whole new way because it is the actual manuscript of that novel so you can see it it's filled with her handwriting and her her process of writing this novel so I've been reading through it and it has quite a few surprises so I'm excited to share these with you in this book with you but first I want to talk about my relationship with Virginia Woolf why I love her so much like on a personal level but also on an academic level why I appreciate her so much because I think like a lot of people who love Virginia Woolf writing I first read her when I was at university and I was assigned I think a few of her books for a course but I actually discovered her novel the waves when I was just wandering around the library one evening and I picked it up and thought I would start reading it and I just fell in love with it and it became my favorite novel ever but actually this isn't the book that I would recommend people to start reading if they've never read Virginia Woolf before that book is actually mrs. Dalloway and so I I had these these special editions of her novels and you can see um vintage brought out the the special edition with these beautiful custom design covers a few years ago and I wrote an article for the penguin website talking about Virginia Woolf and the order that I would suggest you read her books in because even though you know I I love the waves so much I think mrs. Dalloway is the phenomena for a number of reasons because mrs. Dalloway was a huge turning point in her evolution as a writer it's actually her fifth published book but it's her first one which fully utilizes this stream-of-consciousness style of writing that she's most famous for and I also think it's her most accessible because at least on the surface the story is quite simple and easy to understand it's all about Clarissa Clarissa Dalloway mrs. Dalloway duh who's throwing a party on 1 June Day but it's also the story of Septimus Hughes a World War 1 veteran suffering from an extreme case of shell shock that's very advanced and this is something that the doctors that he goes to see at the time are perilously unequipped to help him deal with and so these seem like very different characters but Wolfe treats them like two halves of the same coin because they're they're both sort of at the same point in their lives where larger society feels that they're their past their use so naturally they're reflecting on their past and the choices they've made and how they should progress forward and Wolfe captures their thoughts and feelings as they go about a day in London alongside that of several other characters and in doing so she captures the essence of experience as it's really lived how we're affected by what we perceive around us how people make judgements and assumptions about us as we walk through the world and of course how we also make assumptions about other people as well how our memories intrude upon our thoughts as we're just going about our day and how this really changes our experience and how we see and interact with the world so that's why mrs. Dalloway is commonly considered an important book and stands alongside that other big modernist text which is James Joyce's Ulysses and it's actually really interesting to read these books alongside each other because they both take place over the course of an ordinary day in June but they have very different ways of capturing that that sense of daily experience but I think it's easy to assume that mrs. Dalloway was in inevitability for a wolf to write because she had experimented with styles of writing before like in her previous book Jacob's room also utilizes this kind of strange style of writing and also actually the the character of mrs. Dalloway appeared in several short stories and that Virginia Woolf wrote before as well but since I was kind of given by SP books this this new edition of the manuscript version of mrs. Dalloway I'm starting to see the novel in a whole new light and and because it's made me see that like the the actual process of her writing this book was very labored and went through many different versions and the original book that she started with is very different from the book that she ended up with so let me take a minute and show off this book because it's so beautiful because it comes in this this this big ornate case and you slip out the manuscript version and then you see the typescript version of the novel inside and at the very beginning of the book there's a new introduction by Michael Cunningham who wrote the the novel the the hours which is you know the ultimate fan fiction book about Virginia Woolf because it she she takes as the title of this novel the original title of mrs. Dalloway which is the hours which is what she was originally going to call that book and and he he says in his introduction that he's shamelessly you know stole the the title of the book from her and so um you can see in the beginning here she she was gonna call it the hours question mark and when she started writing it in 1923 and one of her main reasons for doing so is because that she captures time throughout the way and the the punctuation of hours um but and marks those hours with the striking of Big Ben and she records on the the hour striking throughout the book so you can sort of follow how time is progressing through the book while the characters are going about their daily life so time is a really important factor in the novel and it's something that she writes about a lot in in some sections and some of which she eventually cut out but also one of the other biggest most fascinating things I discovered in looking at this manuscript version was that she was originally gonna focus on the character of Peter Walsh so this is a character that had proposed to Clarissa Dalloway at one point but she had turned him down and they're still friends and interact with each other and he's still a character in the book but mrs. Dalloway was just going to be a peripheral character in the novel but she then eventually moved to being having center stage in the book and she used her name in the title mrs. Dalloway but she only used her married name which is quite significant and I've been so fascinated going through this text because you can see references to people and relationships and situations which appear in the novel but in altered versions there's a section where she contemplates the meaning of propagating the species which I just think is really interesting she's you can almost see her thought process of of going through and trying to think about these relationships between man and women and independence and the mean of being a parent and there's an amazing line at the start of one section where she declares a delicious idea came to me that I will write anything I want to write and it's so fascinating scene Wolf's process how many false steps she took while whole passages are crossed out and then little notes she makes at the end of a writing session to pick up where she's gonna start writing the next time and even how her thoughts would collapse into lines squiggles across the page so I have loved reading through this beautiful addition and this book is such a treasure I mean it's a beautiful object in itself but also for all the insights it's given me into the novel of mrs. Dalloway and I have to admit at first I was a bit frustrated reading through it because as you can see but Will's handwriting is quite difficult to decipher but I think they published it in this large-scale format because it does make it easier to read and also became a fun sort of puzzle for me trying to figure out what Virginia Woolf actually wrote because then I can see things that were left out of the the final novel and you know then it gave me all these insights behind the actual book and of course I mean it's just amazing having Virginia Woolf actual handwriting because you know it's like I discovered this book in some dusty old cupboard and now are discovering all these things about the novel that I never knew before but also you know this is such a London book and it's quite poignant for me as an American living in London so it inspired me to go around London yesterday and visit all these points that she talks about in mrs. Dalloway but because I luckily live in London I I went through all these spots immortalized in Wolf's novel and you know and even this morning I went through and bought the flowers myself as a tribute to mrs. Dalloway um so I'll go through some clips now and and read some quotes from the novel as I visited all these various locations for having lived in Westminster how many years now over 21 feels even in the midst of the traffic or waking at night Clarissa was positive a particular hush or solemnity an indescribable pause a suspense but that might be her heart affected they said by influenza before been strikes they're out it boomed first a warning musical then the hour irrevocable the leaden circle's dissolved in the air such fools we are she thought crossing Victoria Street for heaven only knows why one loves it so how one sees it so making it up building it round one tumbling it creating it every moment afresh but the various fronts the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps drink their downfall do the same can't be dealt with she felt positive by acts of parliament for that very reason they love life in people's eyes in the swing and trudged in the bellow and the uproar the carriages motorcars omnibuses van sandwich men shuffling and swinging brass bands barrel organs in the triumph and the jingle and the strange hi scene of some airplane overhead was what she loved life london this moment in june she had reached the park gates she stood for a moment looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly she had the oddest sense of being herself invisible unseen unknown there being no more married no more having of children now but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them up Bond Street this being mrs. Dalloway not even Clarissa anymore this being mrs. Richard Dalloway but what was she dreaming as she looked into hat roads shop window what was she trying to recover what image of white dawn in the country as she read in the book spread open fear no more the heat of the Sun nor the Furious winters rages this late age in the world's experience had bred in them all all men and women a well of Tears tears and sorrow courage and endurance a perfectly upright and stoical baron he had only to open his eyes but a weight was on them a fear he strained he pushed he looked he saw a region spark before him long streamers of sunlight fond at his feet the trees waved brandished we welcomed the world seemed to say we accept we create beauty the world seemed to say and as if to prove it scientifically wherever he looked at the houses at the railings at the antelope stretching over the palings Beauty sprain instantly to watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy up in the sky swallows swooping swerving fleeing the selves in and out round and round yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them and the flies rising and falling and the Sun spotting now this leaf now I know it sounds sentimental but I found it really poignant walking through the streets of London and imagining how Virginia Woolf must have done the same when she was plotting and planning how she would write this novel and how little observations and thin she noticed in the city must have gone into the novel as well and it really reinforced the main ideas of the novel of how there are these layers of time and memory that we experience just as were walking down the street and it made me reflect on my own past experiences and choices I've made or didn't make and it made me want to go back to reading Wolf's novels as well because every time I go back to reading her books I always find new things and you know she just packs so much into one sentence but I hope you've found that that even if you think you know the novel mrs. Dalloway you'll see that there is still so much more to discover about it so leave comments below if you have any thoughts or questions or feelings about wolf or any of her books I'll leave all sorts of good links in the description below but thank you for watching and following along with this wolf [Music] you

Channel: Eric Karl Anderson

Views: 12,090

Keywords: booktube, virginia woolf, mrs dalloway, reading mrs dalloway, sp editions, manuscript mrs dalloway, mrs dalloway london, woolf the waves, Classic novels, Modernist fiction

Id: w8sZGAHVVCw

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019