Yet another one
of the books that I got from Books for Free in Stratford before its untimely
closure last year. Having only read To
the Lighthouse, I was determined to find something by Virginia Woolf that
could be, erm, readable for me. I picked Mrs
Dalloway not so much because I knew what it was about, but rather because I
loved Cunningham’s The Hours so much
(maybe not the most valid of premises, but hey, it did the trick).
Turns out that Mrs Dalloway was in fact readable (so
much so that I even managed to read most of it during a train ride between
London and Cambridge without feeling the need to shoot myself in the foot) and,
rather surprisingly, it was also quite enjoyable. Clearly, I found the troubled
life of Septimus Warren Smith to be much more interesting than Clarrisa’s own
(despite the fact that her relation, or lack thereof, with Sally is so very
beautifully sad).
Most of all,
having been at the London School of Economics for almost ten years now,
surrounded by the myth of Virginia Woolf, the Fabian Society, and the
Bloomsbury Group, reading Mrs Dalloway has
allowed me to have an eye-opening epiphany: most of them were probably horrible
people who ultimately either hated (or at the very least disliked profoundly)
each other and only pretended to be friends because it could come in handy.
Yes, rather sad…
