The large notebooks containing Woolf’s handwritten draft of “The Hours” – her working title for Mrs Dalloway – are in the British Library, which would be the perfect venue for an exhibit and a conference. London (along with New York) is the place where Dalloway scholars come to work. Many London tours already offer Dalloway walks, following the paths of Clarissa, her daughter Elizabeth, her former suitor Peter Walsh, and her suicidal double Septimus Smith. Mrs Dalloway is both a modernist masterpiece and one of the great novels about London. Why is Leopold Bloom more important than Clarissa Dalloway? How did Dublin get to own a single day in literary history, and London miss out? I think Dallowday is a date worth celebrating – it should be the occasion of readings, exhibitions, performances and revelry. But while Bloomsday on 16 June is the occasion of riotous celebrations in Dublin and around the world, the day of Mrs Dalloway’s party is ignored. L ike Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in a single city on a single day: London on 13 June 1923.
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