0:00:02 > 0:00:04CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC
0:00:11 > 0:00:16In 1917, as the First World War raged in France,
0:00:16 > 0:00:18the writer Virginia Woolf took her daily walk
0:00:18 > 0:00:20across the Sussex countryside.
0:00:25 > 0:00:27Although a long way from the conflict,
0:00:27 > 0:00:31she could hear guns echoing across the English Channel -
0:00:31 > 0:00:34and reports from the front line affected her deeply.
0:00:39 > 0:00:40For the rest of her life,
0:00:40 > 0:00:44she would look for ways of writing about this violence and breakage.
0:00:50 > 0:00:53Virginia Woolf came of age as a writer at a strange time -
0:00:53 > 0:00:57when Europe was so shaken it barely knew itself.
0:00:58 > 0:01:02In these uncertain years, the Victorian novel, with its firm
0:01:02 > 0:01:07plots and knowable characters seemed out of place.
0:01:07 > 0:01:09Woolf sensed the need for change.
0:01:09 > 0:01:12Everything was going to be new,
0:01:12 > 0:01:14everything was going to be different.
0:01:14 > 0:01:16Everything was on trial.
0:01:22 > 0:01:27Dividing her writing life between this quiet stretch of Sussex
0:01:27 > 0:01:30and a home in London, Virginia Woolf would play a leading role
0:01:30 > 0:01:32in a literary revolution.
0:01:37 > 0:01:40Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925,
0:01:40 > 0:01:44would help change our thinking about what a novel could be
0:01:44 > 0:01:46and how it could be written.
0:01:49 > 0:01:53In writing this book, Woolf would tackle subjects close to her heart.
0:01:57 > 0:02:01Reading her manuscripts and diaries, I'm going to follow her
0:02:01 > 0:02:05through the ups and downs of the creative process
0:02:05 > 0:02:09and catch a glimpse of a great writer at work
0:02:09 > 0:02:11as she brings a radical new novel to life.
0:02:36 > 0:02:41"Big Ben strikes. First a warning, musical;
0:02:41 > 0:02:43"then the hour, irrevocable.
0:02:43 > 0:02:47"The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
0:02:48 > 0:02:50"In people's eyes,
0:02:50 > 0:02:55"in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar;
0:02:55 > 0:02:59"the carriages, motor cars, sandwich men shuffling and swinging.
0:02:59 > 0:03:05"This was what she loved - life; London; this moment of June."
0:03:07 > 0:03:11When Virginia Woolf started to write Mrs Dalloway in 1922,
0:03:11 > 0:03:14she was already a respected writer and reviewer.
0:03:14 > 0:03:18But she sensed that this was going to be her "high summer",
0:03:18 > 0:03:20this was her moment.
0:03:20 > 0:03:22If she was going to make a mark on the literary world,
0:03:22 > 0:03:24it had to be now.
0:03:26 > 0:03:31The story unfolds over the course of a single day in London.
0:03:31 > 0:03:35It dips in and out of many different lives
0:03:35 > 0:03:37but focuses on two people in particular.
0:03:38 > 0:03:42Part of Woolf's audacity is that these people never meet.
0:03:44 > 0:03:46There's Clarissa Dalloway,
0:03:46 > 0:03:49a society hostess, the wife of a Conservative MP,
0:03:49 > 0:03:54and she's going to be throwing a lavish party in the evening.
0:03:54 > 0:03:56And then there's Septimus Warren Smith.
0:03:56 > 0:04:00A shell-shocked soldier, whose honourable military career
0:04:00 > 0:04:03is about to come to a tragic end.
0:04:03 > 0:04:05BIG BEN CHIMES
0:04:05 > 0:04:09The regular chimes of Big Ben punctuate the novel,
0:04:09 > 0:04:11ringing out across the city,
0:04:11 > 0:04:15linking disparate people as they pause to register the time.
0:04:17 > 0:04:18Now, it must be said
0:04:18 > 0:04:22that the plot of this novel doesn't sound very promising.
0:04:22 > 0:04:25A man walks around London - a woman prepares for a party
0:04:25 > 0:04:28and receives a visit from someone she didn't marry.
0:04:28 > 0:04:29Time passes.
0:04:30 > 0:04:34But what makes Mrs Dalloway so inventive isn't the plot itself -
0:04:34 > 0:04:36but the way that it's written -
0:04:36 > 0:04:39and the way that all the different strands of it relate.
0:04:41 > 0:04:43Parallel stories,
0:04:43 > 0:04:47parallel lives. Linked only by a web of associations.
0:04:49 > 0:04:54Mrs Dalloway would be a risk but it echoed the mood of the times.
0:04:57 > 0:05:00Britain had emerged from the First World War a damaged nation.
0:05:05 > 0:05:08The term "shell shock" first appeared in newspaper reports
0:05:08 > 0:05:12in 1922, the year Virginia Woolf began Mrs Dalloway.
0:05:15 > 0:05:18It resonated with what she already knew -
0:05:18 > 0:05:20that the past is always
0:05:20 > 0:05:27with us, that memory persists, that something fundamental had changed,
0:05:27 > 0:05:31something that could not be healed by victory parades and bunting.
0:05:34 > 0:05:37So, at this very tense time in the early 1920s,
0:05:37 > 0:05:40it feels like all society is facing, in a way, two directions,
0:05:40 > 0:05:43thinking back over the war, looking ahead.
0:05:43 > 0:05:48This is a time when several writers, of whom Woolf's one,
0:05:48 > 0:05:50are very self-consciously
0:05:50 > 0:05:54experimenting with new kinds of writing which are supposed to be,
0:05:54 > 0:05:57sort of, adequate to a new modern world,
0:05:57 > 0:05:59and doing so in quite a rivalrous way.
0:05:59 > 0:06:02How much was she in conscious competition, then,
0:06:02 > 0:06:04with other writers, do you think?
0:06:04 > 0:06:07She herself, if you read her letters, was quite, sort of,
0:06:07 > 0:06:10unsettled by the experiments of the other,
0:06:10 > 0:06:13sort of, great modernist writers of the period.
0:06:13 > 0:06:16So, TS Eliot is coming round, reading The Waste Land aloud.
0:06:16 > 0:06:18I mean, that must have felt quite a challenge.
0:06:18 > 0:06:20Yeah, you might think it was a privilege.
0:06:20 > 0:06:22But I think it's a bit scary, too!
0:06:22 > 0:06:24So what did she do differently, then?
0:06:24 > 0:06:29Well, I think what she tried to do, in fiction, was to find
0:06:29 > 0:06:32a form for the novel which was true, really, to the way people thought
0:06:32 > 0:06:35rather than what they did or what they said.
0:06:35 > 0:06:40It's an extraordinary, sort of, map of internal plots
0:06:40 > 0:06:43and people's dialogues with themselves,
0:06:43 > 0:06:46rather than what's going on in the exterior world.
0:06:52 > 0:06:58"She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged.
0:06:58 > 0:07:00"She sliced like a knife through everything,
0:07:00 > 0:07:03"at the same time was outside looking on.
0:07:05 > 0:07:11"She had a perpetual sense of being out, far out to sea and alone."
0:07:14 > 0:07:20There's a powerful sense of feelings throttled and of lives disappointed.
0:07:20 > 0:07:23It's partly about the way the English stiff upper lip...
0:07:23 > 0:07:26- Totally.- ..has affected our internal emotional lives.- Totally.
0:07:26 > 0:07:29And the stiff upper-lipness of it, I think, is really conscious.
0:07:29 > 0:07:32There's an extraordinary bit near the beginning of the novel where
0:07:32 > 0:07:36Clarissa Dalloway is thinking about the war,
0:07:36 > 0:07:38when she remembers Lady Bexborough
0:07:38 > 0:07:43who opened a bazaar with a telegram in her hand, "they said."
0:07:43 > 0:07:47And "they said" brilliantly lets you see that Lady Bexborough
0:07:47 > 0:07:50is almost admired for the fact that the telegram,
0:07:50 > 0:07:53which tells that her son has died, he's been killed in the war,
0:07:53 > 0:07:57- doesn't stop her doing her duty of opening the bazaar.- Carrying on.
0:07:57 > 0:07:58- Yes.- Yes.
0:07:58 > 0:08:02And that seems such a, sort of, unflinching image of,
0:08:02 > 0:08:07kind of, how feeling is controlled and conquered in the novel.
0:08:20 > 0:08:24"Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing,
0:08:24 > 0:08:27"the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day,
0:08:27 > 0:08:32"counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out
0:08:32 > 0:08:37"in a chorus the supreme advantages of having a sense of proportion."
0:08:39 > 0:08:41By setting her novel on a single day
0:08:41 > 0:08:45punctuated by the chimes of Big Ben on the hour,
0:08:45 > 0:08:48Woolf was giving herself a definite framework,
0:08:48 > 0:08:52a solid shape and structure within which she could deal
0:08:52 > 0:08:55with some very difficult things, not only the trauma of war,
0:08:55 > 0:09:00but, also, some of her own hardest and least containable experiences.
0:09:06 > 0:09:11While Clarissa Dalloway rejoices in London life,
0:09:11 > 0:09:15Septimus sees the city very differently.
0:09:15 > 0:09:19A busy street becomes a nightmarish visions of the trenches.
0:09:19 > 0:09:23There are men trapped in mines, women burned alive
0:09:23 > 0:09:27and brutality blaring out on placards.
0:09:29 > 0:09:34In writing Septimus, Virginia Woolf was drawing on personal experience.
0:09:37 > 0:09:42Woolf had a breakdown aged 13, following the death of her mother.
0:09:42 > 0:09:46And episodes of mental illness would recur for the rest of her life.
0:09:48 > 0:09:52At times she was bedridden, plagued by voices and hallucinations.
0:09:56 > 0:09:59Virginia Woolf saw many doctors in the course of her life,
0:09:59 > 0:10:02so she was well aware of how the medical profession
0:10:02 > 0:10:06struggled to understand and treat mental illness.
0:10:06 > 0:10:09In the passages where Septimus is being examined by experts,
0:10:09 > 0:10:12you can really feel her own frustration coming through.
0:10:12 > 0:10:16"When he felt like that, he went to the Music Hall, said Dr Holmes.
0:10:16 > 0:10:19"He took a day off with his wife and played golf.
0:10:19 > 0:10:24" 'Why not try two tablets of bromide dissolved in a glass of water at bedtime?'
0:10:24 > 0:10:27"No, there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter."
0:10:29 > 0:10:31BIG BEN CHIMES
0:10:34 > 0:10:37Woolf wrote into the character of Septimus
0:10:37 > 0:10:40some of her own disturbing episodes,
0:10:40 > 0:10:43merging her private illness with a public story
0:10:43 > 0:10:46and taking control of her experience by writing about it.
0:11:04 > 0:11:08Virginia Woolf was torn between the infectious vivacity of London
0:11:08 > 0:11:11and her desire for solitude and space.
0:11:13 > 0:11:16At Monk's House, in Rodmell, East Sussex,
0:11:16 > 0:11:18she found an antidote to the city.
0:11:23 > 0:11:27When she was at Monk's House, work happened here -
0:11:27 > 0:11:29in a shed at the bottom of the garden.
0:11:31 > 0:11:34For her, writing was an addiction.
0:11:34 > 0:11:38She took to it, she once said, "as some people do to gin."
0:11:42 > 0:11:46Woolf took great joy in a well-organised day.
0:11:46 > 0:11:50From ten until one was her inviolable time for writing.
0:11:50 > 0:11:53She'd tune-up first with a cigarette
0:11:53 > 0:11:55and then think through the first words.
0:11:55 > 0:11:58In the afternoon she'd often go for a walk, sometimes miles
0:11:58 > 0:12:02and miles, saying over to herself the sentences she'd been writing
0:12:02 > 0:12:06that morning, letting the rhythm of them fall in tune with her step.
0:12:06 > 0:12:10And then, in the evening, there would be immersive reading,
0:12:10 > 0:12:13perhaps literature or history.
0:12:13 > 0:12:17And some image or tempo from Shakespeare might start
0:12:17 > 0:12:19the tune for the next morning's writing.
0:12:23 > 0:12:25As a publisher and reviewer,
0:12:25 > 0:12:29Woolf was well aware of new work by other contemporary writers.
0:12:31 > 0:12:35Setting Mrs Dalloway over the course of a single day in a city
0:12:35 > 0:12:39was a riposte to James Joyce, whose epic novel, Ulysses,
0:12:39 > 0:12:43charts a day in the life of two men in Dublin.
0:12:47 > 0:12:52Woolf read and wrote about Joyce's novel in 1922,
0:12:52 > 0:12:55just when the first ideas were forming for Mrs Dalloway.
0:12:55 > 0:12:57And she was certainly intrigued by it.
0:12:57 > 0:13:00She acknowledged Joyce's brilliance.
0:13:00 > 0:13:03She couldn't help feeling it was rather pretentious.
0:13:03 > 0:13:07She wrote frankly in her diary that she was about as irritated
0:13:07 > 0:13:11by it as by "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."
0:13:13 > 0:13:17But she knew that, like Joyce, she was attempting something new
0:13:17 > 0:13:20and with all innovations there are risks.
0:13:27 > 0:13:30In a diary entry for June 1923,
0:13:30 > 0:13:33Virginia Woolf reflected on the progress of her novel.
0:13:36 > 0:13:40"I foresee this is going to be the devil of a struggle.
0:13:40 > 0:13:43"The design is so queer and so masterful.
0:13:43 > 0:13:46"It is certainly original and interests me hugely."
0:13:51 > 0:13:54Woolf wrote the first drafts of Mrs Dalloway
0:13:54 > 0:13:58in three large notebooks, now held here, at the British Library.
0:14:02 > 0:14:07To turn the pages is about as close as we can get to witnessing
0:14:07 > 0:14:09a great novel taking shape.
0:14:14 > 0:14:18One of the striking things, actually, is the book itself.
0:14:19 > 0:14:23I do my writing on, you know, pre-produced A4 pads.
0:14:23 > 0:14:26But Virginia Woolf loved the feel of books
0:14:26 > 0:14:29so she always hand bound her notebooks.
0:14:29 > 0:14:32There's a wonderful sense of the, the book as an object.
0:14:32 > 0:14:35And, of course, Virginia Woolf was a bookmaker,
0:14:35 > 0:14:38running a press with her husband, Leonard.
0:14:38 > 0:14:40She knew about the feel of books
0:14:40 > 0:14:43and she wanted to write her own in good notebooks.
0:14:45 > 0:14:49The first page - "The Hours?"
0:14:49 > 0:14:53And The Hours stayed in her mind as the title of this book.
0:14:53 > 0:14:57She kept swapping between The Hours and Mrs Dalloway,
0:14:57 > 0:15:01as if she's wondering whether the central thing here is to do
0:15:01 > 0:15:05with the passing of time, across a whole city, a whole nation,
0:15:05 > 0:15:09or whether it's actually this one woman and how everything else
0:15:09 > 0:15:13is going to impinge on her personal, private, emotional life.
0:15:24 > 0:15:28This is...recognizably Mrs Dalloway,
0:15:28 > 0:15:31but not quite as we know it.
0:15:31 > 0:15:35She starts rather solemnly, with a procession of young boys,
0:15:35 > 0:15:38the sons of dead officers,
0:15:38 > 0:15:41coming away from laying wreaths at the Cenotaph.
0:15:41 > 0:15:43The mood is very sombre.
0:15:44 > 0:15:47"Silence falls on London and falls on the mind.
0:15:48 > 0:15:51"Time flaps at the mast."
0:15:52 > 0:15:58And, of course, we know that later Woolf decided to begin instead
0:15:58 > 0:16:03with Clarissa, going out into the June morning to hold back
0:16:03 > 0:16:07that feeling of war for later, to come at it, I think,
0:16:07 > 0:16:10more obliquely and all the more powerfully for that.
0:16:20 > 0:16:25It's so exciting to see Woolf's pen just dashing across the page.
0:16:25 > 0:16:27You can see the places where she clearly knows exactly what
0:16:27 > 0:16:29she wants to say.
0:16:29 > 0:16:33And then there are pauses and crossings out, hesitations.
0:16:35 > 0:16:36In a sense, actually,
0:16:36 > 0:16:39this manuscript is like another sort of diary
0:16:39 > 0:16:43because she's marking the date in the margin so we can see
0:16:43 > 0:16:47almost day-by-day what she's thinking and what she's writing.
0:16:50 > 0:16:54Do you know, we've even got a quick pencil sketch of a floor plan
0:16:54 > 0:16:57for one of the houses that Virginia Woolf is
0:16:57 > 0:16:59thinking of renting in London.
0:17:00 > 0:17:03The wonderful sense of the rest of her life going on at the same
0:17:03 > 0:17:05time as trying to write this book.
0:17:07 > 0:17:11I think we can see, particularly, actually, that the
0:17:11 > 0:17:16passages with Septimus are really heavily worked, particularly
0:17:16 > 0:17:20those places where Septimus is having his hallucinations,
0:17:20 > 0:17:23where he's going to Harley Street and seeing the doctors.
0:17:23 > 0:17:28You can see the hesitations, lots and lots of different versions.
0:17:28 > 0:17:33Sometimes during the periods of her illness, she wasn't able to write.
0:17:33 > 0:17:38I think we get a feeling for two battles going on at once here -
0:17:38 > 0:17:42Woolf's working at her limits as a writer,
0:17:42 > 0:17:46cajoling all of this disparate material into a new form.
0:17:46 > 0:17:51And at the same time, quite inseparably, she's finding
0:17:51 > 0:17:54a way of writing about the illness she'd never
0:17:54 > 0:17:56written about in this way before.
0:18:03 > 0:18:06In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to write about what
0:18:06 > 0:18:10she knew, but to bring the whole world into it.
0:18:11 > 0:18:15She wanted, she said, "to make people talk about everything in
0:18:15 > 0:18:18"the whole of life so that one's hair stands on end
0:18:18 > 0:18:20"in a drawing room".
0:18:21 > 0:18:23It was quite a challenge.
0:18:27 > 0:18:30The central character didn't come easily.
0:18:30 > 0:18:35Woolf faltered, she almost abandoned the book in a dismal moment
0:18:35 > 0:18:41when Clarissa seemed "too stiff, too glittering and tinselly".
0:18:41 > 0:18:46Then she had a breakthrough - she invented Clarissa's memories.
0:18:46 > 0:18:48She showed how rapidly,
0:18:48 > 0:18:53involuntarily, all kinds of scenes from the past come into mind.
0:18:53 > 0:18:57And through those memories we learn about Clarissa's old flame,
0:18:57 > 0:18:59Peter Walsh, who's just come back from India
0:18:59 > 0:19:02and is coming to her party.
0:19:02 > 0:19:07We learn about the mesmerizing Sally Seaton who Clarissa loved
0:19:07 > 0:19:08and kissed.
0:19:08 > 0:19:13We get a sense of some of her frustration that marriage has
0:19:13 > 0:19:17made her Mrs Richard Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more.
0:19:17 > 0:19:21We share, I think, some of her yearning for all the lives
0:19:21 > 0:19:26she might have led - her wistful reflections on the paths not taken.
0:19:32 > 0:19:36Woolf's diaries reveal that the character of Clarissa Dalloway
0:19:36 > 0:19:40may have been shaped by the unexpected death of a family friend.
0:19:40 > 0:19:43The circumstances were ambiguous -
0:19:43 > 0:19:47reports said she had fallen over the banisters.
0:19:47 > 0:19:52I wonder how important you think it was that the family friend
0:19:52 > 0:19:56- of her youth, Kitty Maxse...- Yes.- ..died just
0:19:56 > 0:19:58when she was starting to write Mrs Dalloway?
0:19:58 > 0:20:02She was the young woman Virginia Woolf should have been
0:20:02 > 0:20:03brought up to be.
0:20:03 > 0:20:06She was the young woman her mother had approved of,
0:20:06 > 0:20:08who'd made the right kind of marriage.
0:20:08 > 0:20:13And had been a sort of model of rectitude and good manners.
0:20:13 > 0:20:16But that marriage didn't turn out terribly well.
0:20:16 > 0:20:19And I don't think she would have been terribly surprised
0:20:19 > 0:20:22if Kitty had somehow fallen...
0:20:23 > 0:20:27..by accident on purpose to her death.
0:20:27 > 0:20:31And so that there is a sense of being very close up to death,
0:20:31 > 0:20:34that's very important, I think, for the novel.
0:20:34 > 0:20:38So, Clarissa is a curious blend of Kitty Maxse,
0:20:38 > 0:20:43who Virginia Woolf didn't love, and something of herself.
0:20:43 > 0:20:47Virginia Woolf had her own domestic choices to make.
0:20:47 > 0:20:54Yes, and she writes one letter when she's 29 to her sister Vanessa Bell.
0:20:54 > 0:20:57It's a very depressed letter saying, "to be 29 and unmarried".
0:20:57 > 0:21:00- And she was, of course, very beautiful...- Very beautiful.
0:21:00 > 0:21:02..could have seduced anybody she wanted.
0:21:02 > 0:21:05She could have. And then Leonard Woolf came on the scene.
0:21:05 > 0:21:09And, I think, she was not in love with him initially.
0:21:09 > 0:21:11But she took him very seriously.
0:21:11 > 0:21:14This was a man she could marry.
0:21:14 > 0:21:16He was not what her family would have expected,
0:21:16 > 0:21:19because he was Jewish and he had no money.
0:21:19 > 0:21:22So that's what she writes defiantly when she agrees to marry him -
0:21:22 > 0:21:26she writes, "I'm going to marry a penniless Jew".
0:21:26 > 0:21:28And yet they were together as writers.
0:21:28 > 0:21:31And I remember Woolf saying that this marriage would work,
0:21:31 > 0:21:35"because he has written a novel and so have I".
0:21:35 > 0:21:37And this is how they saw it.
0:21:37 > 0:21:39JAUNTY 1920S MUSIC
0:21:46 > 0:21:49Virginia Woolf completed her redrafts for Mrs Dalloway
0:21:49 > 0:21:53amidst the bustle and breeziness of Bloomsbury.
0:21:53 > 0:21:57She revelled in being back at the centre of things with music,
0:21:57 > 0:22:01talk and city views once again within her reach.
0:22:04 > 0:22:08When Woolf finished the novel, in good health, in October 1924,
0:22:08 > 0:22:10she could congratulate herself.
0:22:10 > 0:22:12In a sense, it was a triumph over the illness she'd been
0:22:12 > 0:22:14writing about.
0:22:14 > 0:22:16And she'd even met the deadline she'd punctiliously
0:22:16 > 0:22:18set herself six months before.
0:22:25 > 0:22:29Big Ben strikes and dusk descends across the city.
0:22:29 > 0:22:33There's a sense of magic and carnival in the air.
0:22:35 > 0:22:39And, at last, we arrive at Mrs Dalloway's party.
0:22:39 > 0:22:41BACKGROUND LAUGHTER
0:22:41 > 0:22:45Here, the lives of the society hostess
0:22:45 > 0:22:48and the shell-shocked soldier will finally coincide.
0:22:55 > 0:22:59The party is a summing up of Clarissa's life.
0:22:59 > 0:23:03People she has known across many, many years come together in it.
0:23:03 > 0:23:07It's a glittering social occasion filled with everyone who's anyone
0:23:07 > 0:23:10in the British Establishment, even the Prime Minister.
0:23:13 > 0:23:16Clarissa is in her element, a magnetic presence
0:23:16 > 0:23:20at the centre of things, drawing all her guests together.
0:23:20 > 0:23:22CHATTER AND LAUGHTER
0:23:25 > 0:23:29But the gaiety is interrupted by the news that
0:23:29 > 0:23:30"a young man has killed himself".
0:23:35 > 0:23:39The shell-shocked Septimus has leapt from his bedroom window
0:23:39 > 0:23:42and fallen to his death on the railings below.
0:23:42 > 0:23:46Suddenly, in the midst of the party among the life
0:23:46 > 0:23:53and the laughter, there is death, shocking, palpable, inescapable.
0:23:53 > 0:23:56"Up had flashed the ground, through him,
0:23:56 > 0:24:00"blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes.
0:24:00 > 0:24:04"There he lay, with a thud, thud, thud in his brain,
0:24:04 > 0:24:07"and then a suffocation of blackness."
0:24:12 > 0:24:15Clarissa steps aside from her party.
0:24:15 > 0:24:19She senses something disturbingly familiar in this stranger's death.
0:24:26 > 0:24:30Woolf originally intended that Clarissa would kill herself,
0:24:30 > 0:24:34or that, perhaps, she would die at the end of her party.
0:24:34 > 0:24:37But then she decided to swap things round.
0:24:37 > 0:24:43In fact, Septimus would be the one to die and Clarissa would live.
0:24:43 > 0:24:47This becomes, then, a novel about Clarissa's survival.
0:24:47 > 0:24:51Woolf calls the book, Mrs Dalloway, naming it after the woman who lives.
0:24:51 > 0:24:55She makes it, in a sense, a book about a resurrection.
0:24:55 > 0:24:59By bringing Clarissa and Septimus together in the final scene,
0:24:59 > 0:25:03Woolf delivers a powerful social critique.
0:25:03 > 0:25:06The party is full of members of The Establishment -
0:25:06 > 0:25:10it's what young men like Septimus fought and died for.
0:25:10 > 0:25:14His death is a disaster that belongs to all of us -
0:25:14 > 0:25:17it's society's collective disgrace.
0:25:21 > 0:25:26Virginia Woolf makes Clarissa walk back into the crowded party.
0:25:26 > 0:25:28After all the complexity of the novel,
0:25:28 > 0:25:31the last line is as simple as they come.
0:25:33 > 0:25:36" 'It is Clarissa'... for there she was."
0:25:45 > 0:25:50Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925.
0:25:50 > 0:25:55Virginia Woolf could finally hold a copy in her hands - she had done it.
0:25:57 > 0:26:03Allowing herself a moment of excitement, she wrote in her diary -
0:26:03 > 0:26:06"I wonder if this time, I have achieved something?
0:26:06 > 0:26:10"I might have become one of the interesting...
0:26:10 > 0:26:14"I will not say great, but interesting novelists."
0:26:16 > 0:26:20Mrs Dalloway sold well, outstripping all Woolf's previous publications
0:26:20 > 0:26:23and establishing her as a major modern writer.
0:26:23 > 0:26:27It paid for the installation of hot water at Rodmell and even for
0:26:27 > 0:26:31a loo which was for ever afterwards known as Mrs Dalloway's closet.
0:26:31 > 0:26:34But it did much more than that.
0:26:34 > 0:26:38As generations read and reread the novel,
0:26:38 > 0:26:42they came to appreciate the design more clearly.
0:26:42 > 0:26:45They saw the achievement of having written Septimus,
0:26:45 > 0:26:50not only as Clarissa's opposite but also, in some ways, as her double.
0:26:50 > 0:26:55They saw the audacity of suggesting that Clarissa, the respectable socialite,
0:26:55 > 0:26:59also felt very like the young man who had killed himself.
0:27:04 > 0:27:07With hindsight there's an inescapable resonance
0:27:07 > 0:27:11between the final scene of Mrs Dalloway, and Woolf's own life.
0:27:13 > 0:27:19In 1941, Virginia Woolf, aged 59 and one of the greatest writers
0:27:19 > 0:27:24of the 20th century, would walk out across the Sussex meadows.
0:27:24 > 0:27:26She did not wish to come back.
0:27:29 > 0:27:34Her body would be found in the River Ouse three weeks later.
0:27:41 > 0:27:43Virginia Woolf's death has become perhaps the most famous
0:27:43 > 0:27:45part of her life.
0:27:45 > 0:27:48But it's certainly not her greatest legacy.
0:27:48 > 0:27:52She found narrative form for all those acrobatic flights
0:27:52 > 0:27:56of thought and association that go on in our minds all the time.
0:27:56 > 0:27:59She even taught us to read in a new ways, negotiating gaps
0:27:59 > 0:28:02and uncertainties.
0:28:02 > 0:28:03Looking at the manuscripts,
0:28:03 > 0:28:06going back through the diaries, I've got a clearer sense than
0:28:06 > 0:28:10ever before of just how bold Woolf was in her writing.
0:28:10 > 0:28:14And I really think that these amazing documents give us a powerful
0:28:14 > 0:28:19sense of just what it took to write what had never been written before.
0:28:26 > 0:28:29I think it would give her great pleasure to know that,
0:28:29 > 0:28:31almost a century on,
0:28:31 > 0:28:34we are still captivated by her vision of life,
0:28:34 > 0:28:37London, this moment of June.
0:28:43 > 0:28:46To dig deeper into Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway
0:28:46 > 0:28:49and the other books in this series a free App from
0:28:49 > 0:28:52The Open University is available to download.
0:28:52 > 0:28:54Go to...
0:28:57 > 0:29:00And follow the links to The Open University.