The Secret Life of Books
Sign in to watch this content please.
- Episode
- Mrs Dalloway
- Description
- Alexandra Harris argues that in her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf developed a new, free-from way of writing that responded to the climate of uncertainty that followed the trauma of the First World War. The secure, certain world described by novelists of the previous generation no longer existed. Similarly, the traditional Victorian novel had died with thousands of innocent young men in the trenches. Literature needed to be completely re-thought, shaken-up and ‘made new’. Woolf wanted to write for the modern world, with all its confusion and uncertainty. She believed this required a completely different approach: one that did not involve such staid literary devices as ‘plot’, character development, and a happy ending. Mrs Dalloway spans a single day in London in June 1923 - seen through the eyes of two central characters who, very radically, never meet. Clarissa Dalloway is a renowned socialite and the wife of an MP, while Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked survivor of WW1. The book’s free-flowing ‘stream-of-consciousness’ structure allows Woolf to show their very different versions of the world - the sane and the insane - and critiques a social system that seeks to exclude those who do not fit the established view. Alexandra shows that insanity was a subject very close to Woolf’s heart; throughout her life, she suffered from bouts of debilitating mental illness. Reading Woolf’s diaries alongside the original manuscript for the work, Alexandra discovers just how much of Woolf’s own experience found its way into the ‘mad-scenes’ she ascribes to Septimus. As her friend, D.H. Lawrence, said when the book was published: ‘this is a novel written from personal experience’. But fascinatingly, during the three years that Woolf worked on Mrs Dalloway she enjoyed a rare period of good-health. Alexandra Harris believes Mrs Dalloway is a book about madness that Woolf wrote so that she could remain sane. Reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries alongside the original manuscript, Alexandra reveals the genesis of the work. It’s a poignant story of how the woman who would become one of the greatest writers of the 20th century battled to transform her private demons into one of the most daring novels of the inter-war years, and the book that would make her name.
- Genre
- Literature
How to cite this record
The Open University, "The Secret Life of Books". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/85941 (Accessed 23 Nov 2025)