Why Woolf?

It’s been a hundred years since Virginia Woolf published her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, and devotees of the book have greeted its centenary with the brassiest of fanfare. This past summer, events known as “Dalloway Days” were even better attended than usual. Celebrated annually around the world but anchored in London, they commemorate the June day in 1923 when Mrs Dalloway takes place, and feature cupcake-heavy receptions along with readings, lectures, panels, film screenings, theatrical performances, art exhibits, U.K. walking tours, and online study sessions. One notably ardent participant is Mark Hussey, a scholar of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, who marked the anniversary by publishing a “biography” of Mrs Dalloway. His book traces the novel’s antecedents, its birth and welfare during Woolf’s lifetime, its shifting fortunes after her death in 1941 at age 59, and its prodigious cultural offspring — much as if he were writing about the life of a person in the world.