‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character.

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Read more the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601

Gillian Beer on Woolf‘s essays: https://lrb.me/realismep602

David Trotter on ‘Mrs Dalloway’: https://lrb.me/realismep603