“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s modernist epic, a quieter answer to James Joyce’s boisterous, poly-vocal “Ulysses.” Unlike Joyce and his tome which we celebrate worldwide on Bloomsday (June 16th), Woolf and her entangled narratives are admired, taught, and read the world over but there’s no day dedicated to Clarissa Dalloway’s trek through London.
Mrs. Dalloway offers a more complicated portrait of life and love than Molly Bloom’s emphatic yes. In 2016, it seems fitting to celebrate a novel that reflects as much darkness as light.
