James Wood

So if we were just enjoying the novel as an almost pre-modernist, conventional, realist novel, what would we say it does?

What are its sort of standard realist achievements?

Well...

First of all, you'd say this is an incredibly rich and satirical portrait of London and London's imperial power at really a peak.

Well, it's like a moment of the fever cresting.

It's actually a peak moment of power that doesn't know quite yet in certain circles that power is already gone or power is receding.

It's essentially the world, say, that the economist John Maynard Keynes

elegized in his famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in 1919.

Keynes talks about the world that ended in 1914, and interestingly and tellingly describes it from the center point of London.

He writes, "...the inhabitant of London could order by telephone..."

sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

He could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

He could secure, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank.

But most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent.

So that is the Old Etonian economist John Maynard Keynes talking about the view from London in 1914.

And you will note that, first of all, it's the view from London, and secondly, our inhabitant is male.

It's palpably, is it not, the world, if not quite, of Clarissa Dalloway, certainly of Clarissa Dalloway's MP husband, Richard.

It's their London, the sort of London where, as Peter Walsh says at the end of the novel, at Clarissa's famous party, everyone in this room has six sons at Eton.

Places like Eton, the famous elite boarding school, or tropes like writing a letter to the Times, or institutions like, of course, the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben.

are central to the way power is seen in this book.