2025 will see the hundredth anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This novel, set in London on one long day in the early 1920s, is long regarded as one of the pivotal modernist works, especially in terms of its representation of gender and its use of stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue techniques. Reading Merve Emre’s recent annotated edition, published by W. W. Norton, we will explore such themes as the aftermath of war; life in the modern city; depression and its treatment; and the possible lingering effects of the 1918 pandemic, all juxtaposed with perhaps the most memorable party in modern literature.

Nicholas Birns teaches at NYU and is the author most recently of Companion to the Australian Novel (Cambridge University Press) and The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Routledge). He is the author of many other books and articles and teaches widely in different areas of literary study.

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