Mrs Dalloway

"It’s one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. I could really identify with Clarissa, this empty, poor person who is going out to find some flowers for a party. At the same moment, we are following her out into the beautiful morning as the story starts. It’s clear very soon that Clarissa is a woman who has lost her soul among all the duties and conventions of a boring marriage. That loss is so overwhelming and confusing that she loses contact even with her own body. She describes feeling young, but at the same time really old. I don’t know why I identified with her so strongly. At the time I read it I was married, and maybe I knew what was coming. I read it again recently and it felt so accurate, even though things have of course changed. We have legislation against gender discrimination, the right to vote, free abortion, daycare – at least in Sweden we do. But even so, it felt modern because family conservatism as the norm is stronger than it’s ever been. People today are marrying more traditionally than ever. In Sweden we have a huge wedding industry – people putting down a lot of money and energy, which is kind of weird in a way. No, but today we are free to organise our life however we want to. We have all different kinds of family. When Virginia Woolf wrote this book, you needed to be married, there were no options. But today, for my generation, there is no need to get married. Not so many of us are religious, and a woman can be fine without a marriage. Yes, but falling in love is something else. The ritual of marriage is old-fashioned, if you think about it. We are living in a time which is very conservative when it comes to family issues. We had a women’s movement in the 70s that talked about our liberation and freedom, so it’s strange that my generation, the daughters of these women, have effected a backlash. Have you seen Mad Men ? It’s not a coincidence that it’s so popular right now. There is a passage in Mrs Dalloway where Clarissa says she can’t think, write or play piano – she mixes up Armenians and Turks and doesn’t know where the Equator is. This made me think about Lady Diana. She was also an unhappy woman who lost her soul in marriage and convention. It also made me think about Desperate Housewives – women today who are dealing with their looks instead of using their brains."

"It is one of the books that comes to mind when people talk about the stream of consciousness novel. I wanted to put it up against Ulysses because it is such an interesting comparison and contrast. You’ve got a similar sort of structure: this high society woman Clarissa Dalloway preparing for a party. All this book really does is follow her and some other characters wandering through London over the course of one day. It is clearly responding to Ulysses with that structure, but the book reads very very differently. “Septimus Smith hears the birds singing in Greek at one point; the same thing happened to Woolf” One interesting difference I find is that Joyce’s approach is to get into a perspective and master it. I find it very satisfying as a reader. I’m there, I’m Stephen Dedalus for that period of time. Woolf is interested in the intersections between minds. She’s trying to show how minds bleed into each other. Joyce is more ambitious, I think, in just depicting the contents of consciousness, whereas Woolf hedges around more by using phrases like he thought, she thought, more old-fashioned constructions. But what Woolf gives us that Joyce doesn’t is psychopathology. The character Septimus Smith is traumatized by his experiences in the Great War, particularly the death of his friend, Evans, and you see Smith hallucinating. For example, seeing a Skye Terrier turning into a man at one point. I have a particular interest in the experience of hearing voices or auditory verbal hallucinations, and Woolf was somebody who actually had these experiences, wrote about them, and cited them, tragically, in her suicide letter. Septimus Smith hears the birds singing in Greek at one point and the same thing happened to Woolf. It is an experience that she reported herself."