Premium

Opinion The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowers

The questions raised by Virginia Woolf’s heroine, her arc, are still relevant

The Third Edit: Mrs Dalloway at 100: She can buy herself flowersIn an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier.

By: Editorial

May 15, 2025 06:52 AM IST First published on: May 15, 2025 at 06:52 AM IST

A century ago, writer Virginia Woolf handed readers a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, and in doing so, rewrote the possibilities of fiction. Not with grand events, but with the quiet rhythms of a woman’s heart. “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” and as she set out from her elite Westminster home, the simple act became an existential event, an examination of her interior life, her longing and loneliness and the way she shrinks and expands with the roles society has placed upon her. Through the narrative, Woolf gave depth to what was so peremptorily dismissed in reality as well as in fiction at the time — the lives of girls and women — and refused to look away.

In an era when intellect was coded male and the literary canon dominated by the external and the action-driven, Woolf was in every way an outlier. She challenged the primacy of plot with a stream of consciousness that flowed unapologetically through doubt, memory, and fragmented desire. In Mrs Dalloway, time bent and buckled to accommodate emotion; in A Room of One’s Own (1929), she declared space and income the foundations for female creativity. These were radical acts of reclamation. She wrote with the full force of a mind that refused to compartmentalise intellect and emotion, and made room for a new language for both feminism and fiction.

Advertisement

A century and many movements for women’s rights later, the questions Mrs Dalloway raised continues to be relevant still: How do women stitch meaning into days that ask them to be beautiful, dutiful, but not necessarily whole? How do women live truthfully in a world that so often mistakes performance for presence? In an age of curated selves and constant noise, Mrs Dalloway pulls people back to the politics of thought, the necessity of empathy. Woolf’s work endures not simply because it was ahead of its time, but because it continues to meet each generation exactly where they are — searching, unsettled, and yearning for more.

Edition
Install the Express App for
a better experience
Featured
Trending Topics
News
Multimedia
Follow Us
Idea Exchange‘I call a spade a spade… that’s why I was unfairly removed from my party’: Kalvakuntla Kavitha
X