“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Nine words into her 1925 classic, Virginia Woolf has taken us to another world. London — Westminster to be precise — in mid-June 1913, a world in which it is unusual for a woman to buy the flowers for her own party. Clarissa Dalloway only steps out into the early morning air (“fresh as if issued to children on a beach”) because her maid, Lucy, “had her work cut out for her.”
The Wednesday in the “middle of June” on which the action of Mrs Dalloway takes place is debated. The year is 1923, which would make the 13th of June the most likely candidate. But as academics are wont to do, there has been some disagreement. Woolf describes a quintessential fixture of the English summertime, a country cricket match (“Surrey was all out once more”). But the dates of this particular cricket match would put the action between the 18th and 20th of June 1923 — not quite the middle of June, and more late June.
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