Écouter l’article en français ( voix générée par l’IA)
Fascinating article by Dr. Elizabeth Gourd, who teaches English literature at the University of Bristol and is an expert on Virginia Woolf and literary modernism, in The London Magazine.
Opening one morning in the middle of June 1923, Mrs Dalloway spans a single day in the lives of its characters. As Clarissa Dalloway crosses Westminster to buy flowers for her party that evening, she observes the everyday traffic of London life – young men and women out walking their dogs, shopkeepers preparing their window displays and wealthy old dowagers running their morning errands.
But beneath these quotidian scenes is a lingering trauma, as society struggles to move on from the horrors of the First World War. Despite five years having lapsed since the armistice, Clarissa’s relief that ‘it was over; thank Heaven—over’ feels disconcertingly premature, since we are informed that the war was not over for everyone: Mrs Foxcroft, for example, still grieving because ‘that nice boy was killed’, or Lady Bexborough, who had received the news via telegram that her favourite son was dead.
Five years on from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a seismic global health event with a considerable death toll, one may easily see the parallels.
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Read the London Magazine article here
