Mrs. Dalloway

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that traces the lives of several characters over the course of a single day in June 1923. The novel jumps between characters, tracing their inner monologues and their memories as they go about London, reminisce about their younger days, and worry about where their lives have brought them. Suzanne and Chris explore this web of connections and parallel lives, and dwell on particular moments of intensity: an overheard conversation at a party, an unexpected kiss, or even riding a bus.

Content warning: the novel and the episode contains discussion of mental illness and suicide.