‘The Dressing-rooms, the Workshops, the Sculleries, the Bubbling Cauldrons’

Abstract

Since 1925, Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway has proved to exert a continuous appeal for generation after generation of readers and writers.1 It is a widely read and a much admired novel and a fertile territory from which other texts have sprouted. Mrs Dalloway has elicited numerous creative responses from authors who have dialogued with it and reproduced its essence in their works. Before focusing on ways in which it gave birth to numerous works on the contemporary literary scene, it is necessary to understand how it came into being; before exploring specific cases of how writers recycle Mrs Dalloway, carry on its innovative features and popularise them in their fiction, this chapter looks at the Mrs Dalloway cycle2 in which Woolf’s memorable idiosyncratic prose attributes originate. Indeed, in order to gauge how and why other authors in the wake of Woolf rewrote this particular text and incorporated it in their works — either homages (see Chapter 2), parodic enterprises (see Chapter 3) or by and large neomodernist contemporary writings which contain and continue the Woolfian aura (see Chapters 4 and 5) — it is important to first observe Woolf’s own ways and means of creating her novel. It is consequently essential to focus on the production of Mrs Dalloway in order to comprehend the reproduction of Woolf’s Dalloway-esque signature by her literary heirs.KeywordsPrime MinisterShort StoryContemporary AuthorPrivate NoteNarrative VoiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.