Society & Culture
What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review, Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention. Cunningham‘s own novel The Hours , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999, pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway . As he reminds readers “The Hours” was Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway – a better choice, I think, because the novel covers a June day in 1923, the hours of which toll away on Big Ben throughout. Virginia Woolf wasn’t the first to adopt a free-association