James Wood

Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books.

My name is James Wood, and our book today is probably the most famous novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925.

Woolf worked on the book roughly between summer 1922 and the summer of 1924.

And most of it was written in the heart of London, in Bloomsbury, at 52 Tavistock Square.

And many of you will know that

The book actually started out as a set of stories.

Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, I think, is the first one.

A sort of set of exercises in which Woolf puts Mrs. Dalloway through her paces in London.

And if you go back and look at those stories, they're notably more conventional and more old-fashionedly realistic than the famously modernist novel series.

We have in our hands today.

And some of you will also know that there was a famous shift happened as Woolf was writing this book about halfway through the process in August 1923.

And she records it in her diary as her discovery.

And her discovery is that she's going to, as she puts it, dig out beautiful caves behind my characters.

The caves shall connect and each comes of daylight at the process.

And she called this my tunneling process.

And she clearly understood this to be a moment, a transformative moment in which she found a way forward and began to radically change the way she was writing the book, which then came quite fast in that final year.

So if you know that about the creative process, then you certainly know that it is a famous modernist text, that it's set on a single day in June 1923.

Woolf was reading James Joyce's Ulysses as she was writing this book.

And you might also know that it takes characters from an earlier novel, The Voyage Out.

It takes Clarissa Dalloway and her husband, Richard Dalloway, and sort of repurposes them for this new, brilliantly modernist, innovative enterprise of seeing what happens to a group of circulating consciousnesses in London.