James Wood

But before we get to the modernist stuff...

I want to emphasize the conventionalities, in a way, of the novel.

And I'm doing this not because I cherish conventionalities for their own sake.

I'm doing it partly because I want to keep

our through line of realism going so that we keep on, as we advance through the series, we keep on remembering, we can go back to Flaubert and remember that we talked about realism in terms of technical elements like free and direct style, aka close third person, or the writer's use of detail, that we talked also about realism as a

as a powerfully, dangerously repertorial account of the world.

In Flaubert's image, it's the scalpel cutting down through the flesh into the bone.

The bone, I would say in this novel, the bone of the body politic in the case of Mrs. Dalloway.

So I want to keep just in mind, before we get to all the innovative things that Woolf does with form, with consciousness, with character in this novel, I want to just remind ourselves of some of the solid, as it were, solid 19th century elements that she inherited and that she always respected and indeed loved as an extremely well-read novelist.

And we do that also because we're doing it for the pleasure, just in the same way that when we started reading Flaubert, we spent a lot of time just enjoying the sentences and the details.

I want to do that, too, with Mrs. Dalloway, because anyone can talk about the modernist innovations in this book, stream of consciousness, Woolf reading Ulysses, perhaps not very much liking Ulysses, but clearly being influenced by it.

Her famous essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which was written in 1924, a year before the book was published, in which she changes the idea of how the novelist will write character in novels.

That's been written about a million times and talked about in a million lecture halls.

But before we do that...

We're missing something if we don't sink down into the book as we did in the case of Madame Bovary or Death of Ivan Illich and just enjoy the solid particularities.

And these solid particularities are not so different from the same kinds of things that Flaubert was enjoying in Madame Bovary.

And they also belong in many ways.

There's a continuity here because they belong to a 19th century way of writing fiction that despite Woolf's modernism and innovations, she never exactly forewent.

She was a loving and respectful reader of the great 19th century novels, perhaps not always of her immediate local English tradition, though she deeply admired Middlemarch, as we know.

But certainly, she was a keen reader of, as we know, the Russian and French 19th century tradition.