Celebrating one of Virginia Woolf’s finest works as it turns 100 years old

One of the most virtuosic novels of all time hits the big 100 on Wednesday, so for this week’s newsletter, it feels only right to celebrate it. I spoke to several novelists about why Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is still a book that everyone should read, and take a look at the centenary celebrations.

And Florence Knapp, whose debut novel The Names was published this week, shares her reading recommendations below.

It is a Wednesday in the middle of June 1923, and Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to throw an evening party.

The ensuing novel – Woolf’s love letter to London, originally called The Hours and later retitled Mrs Dalloway, published 14 May 1925 – is still frequently cited as a source of inspiration by leading contemporary writers (Deborah Levy, Elizabeth Strout, and last year’s Booker winner Samantha Harvey, to name just a few). What is the novel’s enduring appeal?

Novelist Caleb Azumah Nelson, who along with Levy and Edmund de Waal will perform new work inspired by the text at Charleston festival on Wednesday, said that returning to Mrs Dalloway (“it had been many years since I read the book”) was an incredible feast for the senses.

“The depiction of the city and the various portraits of all those running around inside it, all those tenuous connections made strong by Woolf’s writing, portraying the rich interior lives of everyday people, couldn’t be more relevant at a time when we’re less connected than ever.”

To mark the centenary, the Royal Society of Literature is also putting on an immersive adaptation by Helen Tennison, at the London Library on 11-15 June.

The performance is “faithful to the parallel internal and external voices” of the book: audience members wear earpieces which allow them to switch between the characters’ thoughts and external dialogue, said Mekella Broomberg, head of programme at the RSL.

Mrs Dalloway contains “so much at once”, Broomberg added. “Biting social satire, approaches to gender and sexuality and mental illness,” which have a contemporary feel. The RSL is also running a Dalloway-themed panel event at the British Library on 18 June.

Garth Greenwell, whose latest novel is Small Rain, said that for years he had students read the book in every workshop he taught. “Is there another novel that sustains such a pitch of inspired virtuosity, or that can serve so nearly as an encyclopedia of narrative possibilities?”

Woolf’s management of time and perspective are bewilderingly supple, he said. “But what has made the book such a landmark for later writers is how she suffuses the particulars of individual lives, the depths of individual conscious nesses, with a universal, even a cosmic meaningfulness. This makes Mrs Dalloway almost unbearably moving as an affirmation of human dignity.”

Megan Hunter, whose novel Days of Light attracted comparisons to Woolf, said that in Mrs Dalloway, “senses are not only described but continually transformed, so that the reader is offered a new way to perceive – and ultimately to exist within – the ‘infinite richness’ of the city”.

London “is presented almost as a lover: a body that breathes, quivers and dances, that bursts into flames of beauty. We are offered, over and over again, the chance to join this ecstatic June day, to feel the ‘exquisite joy’ of simply being alive, a hundred years later.”

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand. She has such an assured voice – the kind that drops you straight into the story, able to hear the characters, picture their surroundings, feel their grief and the tragedy of the injustices they’re subjected to. It’s fiction but based on a real-life medical scandal in 1970s America that saw thousands of young Black girls sterilised without their consent. The warmth of the writing, and the dogged compassion of community nurse Civil Townsend, save the reader from despair.

I took Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country on holiday with me and stayed up until 4am to finish it, something I haven’t done for years. It’s a page-turner, but also beautifully written. Set in a rural farming community, in the first sentence we learn that a farmer is dead. What follows is part mystery, but greater-part love story. I’ve given copies to friends and family.

I loved Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, so bought Meditations for Mortals as soon as it came out. My copy lives by my bed and is full of underlinings – he makes so many concise and practical suggestions for how we can carve out a meaningful existence in our modern world. Pulling together ideas from literature, philosophy, religion and psychology, he tackles everything from how to stay sane when things seem to be falling apart to how to make peace with the fact that we’ll never be able to read everything. A tip I love too much not to share: rather than thinking of your TBR [to be read] as a towering pile, Burkeman suggests imagining it as “a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by”.