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Belfast Telegraph
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
A century of Clarissa: Why Mrs Dalloway will forever fascinate us
As Virginia Woolf's fourth novel turns 100, Katie Rosseinsky speaks to experts about how this dazzlingly experimental work still has readers and writers under its spell ©UK Independent In his 1998 novel The Hours, writer Michael Cunningham imagines Virginia Woolf sitting down to do battle with the draft of a book that will eventually become Mrs Dalloway. 'Can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?' his fictional version of the novelist ponders. The sweet, sad irony, of course, is that any reader of Mrs Dalloway knows that she needn't fret: the answer to Woolf's self-questioning is a resounding 'yes'. She is, in fact, working on a story so dazzling and expansive that it will prove irresistible to generations of readers to come, including writers like Cunningham. A century on from its debut, Woolf's fourth novel is 'as vital as ever', says Vintage Classics editor Charlotte Knight. To read it 100 years later is to be shocked by its immediacy and the sheer audacity of its experimentation; it's no wonder that contemporary authors are still in its thrall.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
I Work At ‘Dateline.' Here's The 1 Question I Get Asked The Most — And My Answer Might Surprise You.
When I tell people I'm a writer at 'Dateline NBC,' I get a variety of reactions. Often I hear, 'Cool! What's Lester Holt really like?' Or 'Do you think that husband really disconnected his wife's oxygen tank while they were scuba diving on their honeymoon or was it just a bizarre accident?' However, sometimes I detect a look of mild horror, the kind I imagine trauma surgeons and cops get. It's a look that says, Wow, you spend every day immersed in all that darkness. Isn't it depressing? Actually ... no. When I first started at 'Dateline,' the show followed a different format. We covered consumer issues, did investigations and profiles (one was of a young and sunny Taylor Swift, no less), and offered plenty of human interest stories. But times change and so does the audience. True crime is where our audience went and we met it there with, I like to think, an arsenal of journalistic talents: expert storytelling that captures victims, families and killers in all their human, complicated glory; the highest standards of fairness; and maybe just as important as anything else, true respect for the lives that are taken and the loved ones left behind. Still, I admit the subject matter is dark. Nearly every episode involves a murder, or at least a disappearance. We do some powerful stories about the wrongfully convicted, but those people are usually convicted of killing someone. Death almost always figures into what happened in one way or another. I work on the 'open' of the show: the minute and a half at the top that highlights the most dramatic parts of the story. It includes things like: how many hearts the victim touched, how shocking the crime was, and how depraved the killer's actions were. In short, it's made up of the saddest, starkest, most potent stuff. Like my colleagues in this strange, very particular universe, I have developed an eye for small moments that reveal deep emotion, whether it's anger or grief. And I've written the words 'a chilling discovery,' 'a savage assault,' and 'a bizarre twist' more times than I care to count. So, yes … dark. And, of course, heartbreakingly sad. But depressing? No. Many of our greatest and most popular writers — including Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie, to name just a few — wrestle almost exclusively with sinister themes, like violence and murder. People don't tend to think of their work as 'depressing.' Spine-tingling? Yes. As well as engaging. Thought-provoking. I would argue one of the reasons great writers engage with this material is that the stakes in a murder mystery are so high. A human life is taken. In Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Hours,' Virginia Woolf says, 'Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.' But dark stories offer a flip side as well: the possibility for redemption, hope and understanding. This is such a fundamental paradigm that it resonates even with children. Studies show that fairy tales, many of which are scary, help children process difficult emotions like fear, envy and loneliness. This reassures children that they are not alone and that they're 'normal.' Fairy tales give children a safe place to explore these feelings and can teach them how to express and deal with them in an effective, constructive way. For grown-up readers, different kinds of mysteries may offer different kinds of sustenance. In an astute essay for Time magazine, award-winning novelist Tana French argues these stories mostly fall into one of two camps. The first, like those written by Christie, are about restoring order and seeing justice meted out. Her offerings are tidy, self-contained, feature a satisfying resolution — and go perfectly with a cup of tea. 'In a world that can often be chaotic and reasonless, we need these stories,' French writes. Others, which French dubs 'wild mysteries,' ask us to engage with deeper questions about human nature. 'What are we capable of? How much of who we are is determined by choice, by circumstance, or by nature?' French asks. 'The questions stay unanswered because they're unanswerable.' I like to think 'Dateline' gives viewers a bit of both kinds of stories. By the end of the hour, you will (almost always) know who committed the crime. You will know how. You will usually know why. But we take on the deeper, thornier questions, too, like how well do we ever really know another person — even one we're married to? Can a person simply snap? And, in an increasingly complicated world, what constitutes justice? I know some people say that shows like 'Dateline' serve up the trauma and pain of real people for the entertainment of our viewers. But the show's producers tell me that the victims' loved ones say talking about the case provides a kind of balm. They refer to their experience working with 'Dateline' as cathartic and say it leaves them feeling 'lighter.' They feel like someone 'important' is really listening to them and they trust that we will take their story seriously and tell it correctly. It can be a truly transformative experience for them. One producer also told me that 'Dateline' creates 'an important historical record of serious crime. Something that people can always look back on to see what really happened, told by the people it happened to.' In these times of rampant mis- and disinformation, this is no small thing. I believe our stories also resonate with viewers because, though the terrible people are truly terrible, the heroes we feature really are heroic — whether it's the detective who picks up the ice cold case and keeps digging until she finds the truth or the prosecutor who refuses to give up on the impossible-to-prove case or the sister whose hands grow raw from putting up 'missing' posters. These people's resilience struck me in an especially personal way several years ago. Though I'm fortunate to never have experienced violent crime, my mother died when I was a child. One otherwise-unremarkable day, I realized that I was older than she was when she passed. I thought I'd made my peace with her death years earlier, but on that day I was suddenly acutely aware of just how little time she'd been given on this planet. I was stewing in the sour juice of helplessness, bitterness and sadness when I started working on my next 'Dateline' story. As I began to go through the interview tapes to find the best soundbites, I found myself appreciating the friends and family members of the victim in a way I never had before. They had confronted the most terrible thing life could throw at them and somehow kept going in surprising, inspiring ways. The same is true of the loved ones in most of our 'Dateline' stories. Some of these people have actually helped solve cases. Others have found inventive ways to help other families going through similar trauma. But no matter what they've experienced, there's one thing they all share: Despite any apprehension about becoming public people — which in this day and age can be unpleasant or even dangerous — they went on national TV to make sure we knew who their murdered cousin, aunt or friend was. They spoke up to keep their memories alive. Their unbelievable strength has moved and healed me. I now carry some of their words around with me, like an aspirin for a headache, or a railing when I feel wobbly. I work on a program that some have called 'The Murder Show.' They're not wrong, but maybe toiling in a dark world makes the light more visible. Maybe it's only because of sadness that we even know and understand joy. Maybe it's injustice that allows us to appreciate justice. As Virginia Woolf might say, it's contrast. Lorna Graham is the author of 'Where You Once Belonged' and 'The Ghost of Greenwich Village,' and is a writer at 'Dateline NBC.' She has written numerous documentaries, including 'Auschwitz,' produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Meryl Streep, which competed at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Across numerous films, PSAs, and speeches, she's written for Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and Morgan Freeman. She graduated from Barnard College and lives in Greenwich Village. Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@ My Experiences On 'Sex And The City' Left Me Reeling. A Recent Run-In With One Of Its Stars Left Me In Shock. I Was One Of The Most Famous Pop Stars In The World. No One Knew The Secret Pain I Hid. A Guy I Once Dated Is Now Famous, And It's As Weird As You'd Imagine
The Advertiser
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality
Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize.
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
Indian Express
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
10 lesser-known facts about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway on its 100th anniversary
A century on, Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway, remains a profound meditation on time, memory, and human connection. Its stream-of-consciousness style and psychological depth continue to inspire writers and readers alike. In honour of the novel turning 100, we revisit some fascinating, lesser-known details about the modernist masterpiece. From its original title to its surprising literary influences, here are 10 things you might not know about Mrs Dalloway: 1. It was almost called The Hours Before settling on Mrs Dalloway, Woolf's working title was The Hours. Later, Michael Cunningham borrowed the title for his 1998 novel (and the subsequent 2002 film) about Woolf's life and the legacy of her book. 2. Clarissa Dalloway debuted in an earlier novel Long before her 1925 spotlight, Clarissa Dalloway appeared as a minor character in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). . 3. Iterations of the famous first line The iconic opening—'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself'—was originally about gloves, not flowers. Woolf's shift to 'flowers' introduced a motif that blossoms throughout the novel. 4. It was inspired by Ulysses Woolf admired James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) for its single-day structure but criticised its 'squalid' focus on bodily functions. She sought to capture a day in London with more psychological depth and lyrical beauty. 5. The sky-writing scene was based on real-life advertising The mysterious airplane writing letters in the sky was inspired by a 1922 Daily Mail stunt using sky-writing for ads. Woolf transforms it into a symbol of modernity's fleeting, fragmented messages. 6. Septimus Smith was a late addition Originally, Woolf planned to have Clarissa die by suicide. Instead, she created Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran, to embody postwar trauma—while allowing Clarissa to live, deepening the novel's contrasts. 7. Woolf wrote it while battling her own mental illness During Mrs Dalloway's composition, Woolf struggled with depression. Her intimate understanding of mental anguish shaped Septimus's harrowing breakdown and Clarissa's quiet existential reflections. 8. The novel's timeframe mirrors Woolf's writing process The book takes place on a single day in June 1923—a period Woolf wrote about in real-time, drafting sections in sync with the season to capture its sensory richness. 9. Motorcar symbolises modern alienation The motorcar that interrupts London streets represents impersonal modernity, much like Henry Ford's assembly lines. Woolf contrasts this with characters craving individuality in a mechanised world. 10. It's a novel about survival While Clarissa's party is the climax, the book explores deeper tensions: postwar grief, repressed love, and the struggle to find meaning. As Woolf wrote, it's 'a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane.'
