There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Richard’s nickname for Clarissa is Mrs Dalloway and as she plans to celebrate his winning of a major literary prize, she struggles with memories of what might have existed between them had things turned out differently.Īs the novel travels back and forth through the hours of these three women across almost a century, their lives converge, in a moving a devastating manner on the night of Clarissa’s party. In present-day New York, Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor, is planning a party for her former lover and oldest friend Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS. As her day progresses, she fights rising feelings of panic and suffocation regarding her domestic life. In 1949, hemmed-in housewife Laura Brown would love nothing more than to spend her day reading Mrs Dalloway, but she has a young son to look after and a birthday cake to make for her husband’s birthday. She has a visit from her sister Vanessa, argues with her housekeeper and works with her husband, all the while trying to wrestle the demons that have driven her from London to Richmond. In 1923, Virginia Woolf is working on the first draft of what will become Mrs Dalloway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |