{"id":56099,"date":"2025-08-09T04:07:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T04:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/56099\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T04:07:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T04:07:06","slug":"reading-mrs-dalloway-again-and-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/56099\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading ‘Mrs. Dalloway’\u00a0Again and Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf\u2019s novel Mrs. Dalloway<\/a> turned 100 this spring\u2014not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, \u201chad just broken into her fifty-second year.\u201d The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response. But I would put it right alongside that epic, near the very top, because it rewards rereading at various stages of life. As Hillary Kelly wrote<\/a> this week in The Atlantic, \u201cThe novel\u2019s centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic\u2019s books section:<\/p>\n

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway, as many readers do, when I was in college, and it lit up my still-maturing brain. Like Ulysses, it takes place over a single day in June, pulling together a group of narrative perspectives to capture the physical and mental cacophony<\/a> of modern city life. Its characters include Clarissa, who is about to host a high-society party, as well as Septimus Smith, \u201caged about thirty,\u201d a veteran of World War I who ends up jumping to his death. The juxtaposition of life and death, war and peace, youthful fury and wistful wisdom, reflects Woolf\u2019s ambition to deploy stream-of-consciousness style in the service of deep emotional realism. One of the first works of literature to depict what would later be known as PTSD, it is in part about the dangerous passions of youth.<\/p>\n

And yet its title character is 51, married to a politician, and worried that she has forsaken a more adventurous life. Woolf writes that Clarissa, setting off to buy flowers, \u201cfelt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.\u201d I know the feeling\u2014now. When I first read one of the book\u2019s most pivotal scenes, in which Clarissa learns of Septimus\u2019s death during her soir\u00e9e, I interpreted the moment as the reality of war intruding on a bourgeois order oblivious to its own decline. It is that\u2014but it is also the specter of mortality that underpins the anxieties of middle age. As Kelly reminds us, Clarissa thinks: \u201cIn the middle of my party, here\u2019s death.\u201d Yet this thought is immediately followed by an intense affirmation, Kelly writes: \u201cShe steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she\u2019s made, or perhaps because of them, \u2018she had never been so happy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelly finds parallels between this realization and a turning point in Woolf\u2019s own life: At 40, in a moment of respite from her mental illness, she managed to write this book, and then her equally classic novel To the Lighthouse<\/a>. This was, Kelly writes, \u201ca season of fruitfulness\u201d in which \u201cshe produced her most profound work.\u201d At 21, I was ambivalent about Dalloway\u2019s conciliatory ending, in which a woman keeps dread at bay by learning to revel in small and ordinary pleasures. But today, I look forward to the year, not far off, when I will be Clarissa\u2019s age, so that I can read the book again, and see it with the kind of fresh eyes that only time and reading glasses can provide.<\/p>\n

\"Collage-styleIllustration by Akshita Chandra*<\/p>\n

Mrs. Dalloway\u2019s Midlife Crisis<\/p>\n

By Hillary Kelly<\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf\u2019s wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

What to Read<\/p>\n

The Right Stuff<\/a>, by Tom Wolfe<\/p>\n

Wolfe loved big, colorful characters, and he found plenty of them in the cadre of postwar American fighter pilots who helped develop supersonic flight\u2014and, later, manned spaceflight. Wolfe\u2019s subjects risked their lives in the skies over the California desert in military planes, then went on to join NASA\u2019s Mercury program, becoming the first Americans in space. They quickly became Cold War celebrities whose virtues embodied a particular vision of heroism: competent, courageous, ready to lead the world to a new and limitless frontier. But in his account of the early space race, Wolfe contrasts their boy-band glamour with a more laconic aeronautical hero: Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier while secretly nursing broken ribs and later pushed a juiced-up supersonic fighter beyond the edge of the atmosphere, barely surviving the ensuing crash. Skilled, relentless, and taciturn, Yeager embodied \u201cthe right stuff\u201d\u2014that hard-to-define quality that the boundary-breaking pilots and astronauts ended up prizing above all else.\u00a0 \u2014 Jeff Wise<\/p>\n

From our list: Six books that explain how flying really works<\/a><\/p>\n

Out Next Week<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda The Unbroken Coast<\/a>, by Nalini Jones<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State<\/a>, by Caleb Gayle<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban<\/a>, by Jon Lee Anderson<\/p>\n

Your Weekend Read\"MarcIllustration by Akshita Chandra. Source: Karolina Wojtasik \/ HBO.<\/p>\n

Marc Maron Has Some Thoughts About That<\/p>\n

By Vikram Murthi<\/p>\n

Back in the 1990s, when Marc Maron began appearing on Late Night With Conan O\u2019Brien as a panel guest, the comedian would often alienate the crowd. Like most of America at the time, O\u2019Brien\u2019s audience was unfamiliar with Maron\u2019s confrontational brand of comedy and his assertive, opinionated energy. (In 1995, the same year he taped an episode of the HBO Comedy Half-Hour stand-up series, Maron was described as \u201cso candid that a lot of people on the business side of comedy think he\u2019s a jerk\u201d in a New York magazine profile of the alt-comedy scene.) But through sheer will, he would eventually win them back. \u201cYou always did this thing where you would dig yourself into a hole and then come out of it and shoot out of it like this geyser,\u201d O\u2019Brien recently told Maron. \u201cIt was a roller-coaster ride in the classic sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Sign up for The Wonder Reader,<\/a> a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/p>\n

Explore all of our newsletters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-56099","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}