Latest news with #MrsDalloway
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Again and again, we are shocked by the treatment of learning-disabled people. Yet we never learn from the past
BBC Radio 4 has just aired a short series about the writer Virginia Woolf, to celebrate the centenary of her novel Mrs Dalloway. According to the publicity blurb, the aim of Three Transformations of Virginia Woolf was to explore what she 'has to say to us today', and how she 'captured and critiqued a modern world that was transforming around her, treated mental health as a human experience rather than a medical condition, and challenged gender norms'. Because the three episodes immediately followed the Today programme, I distractedly caught two minutes of the first, before flinching, and turning it off. The reason? Only a few days before, I had read a diary entry Woolf wrote in 1915, presented alongside the acknowledgment that she was 'suffering deep trauma at the time', but still so shocking that it made me catch my breath. It was a recollection of encountering a group of learning-disabled people, who were probably residents of a famous institution called Normansfield hospital. 'We met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles,' Woolf wrote. 'The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature … It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.' That passage arrives a third of the way through a brilliant new book titled Beautiful Lives, straplined How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong. Written by the playwright and drama director Stephen Unwin, its story goes from the Greeks and Romans to the 21st century. Much of it is a history of the misunderstanding, hatred and appalling mistreatment experienced by endless millions of people. But partly because Unwin has a learning-disabled son – 28-year-old Joey, who he says has 'challenged everything I was brought up to believe in and turned it on its head' – it is also a very topical demand for all of us 'to celebrate the fact that such people exist and have so much to offer'. A sign of the ignorance Unwin spends some of the book railing against is the fact that this superbly original work, published in early June, has not been reviewed in a single mainstream publication. In the context of the attitudes he writes about, that is probably not much of a surprise – but there again, the book is so timely that its passing-over still feels shocking. After all, it follows the same unquestionable logic as all those high-profile discussions and debates about institutional racism and empire, and demands a very similar process of reckoning. On this subject, there is a mountain of questions to ask. Some are about language that still endures: 'imbeciles', 'morons', 'cretins', 'idiots'. How many of us know about the first official Asylum for Idiots – later the Royal Earlswood Institution for Mental Defectives – founded in Surrey in 1847, and infamous for what Unwin describes as 'widespread cruelty … and soaring mortality rates'? However much young people study history, do their syllabuses ever cover the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which formalised the idea that people categorised as 'idiots' and 'imbeciles' (and all disabled children and young people) should be institutionalised, let alone the fact that it granted local councils powers to remove such people from their families by force? Why is the US's record on institutional cruelty and cod-psychology even worse than the UK's? There is another part of the same story, centred on a slew of 20th-century politicians and cultural figures who believed that learning-disabled people – and disabled people in general – were not just pitiful and wretched, but a threat to humanity's future, an idea expressed in the absurd non-science of eugenics. They included that towering brute Winston Churchill, DH Lawrence (who had visions of herding disabled people into 'a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace'), and lots of people thought of as progressives: Bertrand Russell, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, the one-time Labour party chair Harold Laski, and the trailblazing intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Their credo of pure and strong genes may have been discredited by the defeat of the Nazis, but we should not kid ourselves that everyday manifestations of loathing and condescension that underlay those ideas do not linger on. Ours is the age of such scandals as the one that erupted in 2011 at Winterbourne View, the 'assessment and treatment unit' in Gloucestershire, where people with learning disabilities were left out in freezing weather, had mouthwash poured into their eyes and were given cold showers as a punishment. The year 2013 saw the death in an NHS unit of Connor Sparrowhawk, the autistic and learning-disabled young man whose life was dramatised by Unwin in a profoundly political play titled Laughing Boy, based on a brilliantly powerful book written by Sparrowhawk's mother, Sara Ryan. As well as its principal character's life and death, it highlighted the fact that the health trust that ran the unit in question was eventually found to have not properly investigated the 'unexpected' deaths of more than 1,000 people with learning disabilities or mental-health issues. Right now, about 2,000 learning-disabled and autistic people are locked away in completely inappropriate and often inhumane facilities, usually under the terms of mental health legislation. Only 5% of learning-disabled people are reckoned to have a job. Six out of 10 currently die before the age of 65, compared with one out of 10 for people from the general population. But this is also a time of growing learning-disabled self-advocacy, which will hopefully begin to make change unavoidable. One small example: at this year's Glastonbury, I chaired a discussion about the cuts to disability benefits threatened by the political heirs of Laski and the Webbs. The speakers onstage included Ady Roy, a learning-disabled activist who is involved in My Life My Choice, a brilliant organisation that aims at a world 'where people with a learning disability are treated without prejudice and are able to have choice and control over their own lives'. He was inspirational, but it would be good to arrive at a point where what he did was completely unremarkable. It may sound a little melodramatic, but it is also true: such people, and allies like Unwin, are at the cutting-edge of human liberation. Far too many others may not have the same grim ideas as Woolf, Lawrence, Keynes and all the rest, but their unawareness and neglect sit somewhere on the same awful continuum. That only highlights an obvious political fact that all of us ought to appreciate as a matter of instinct: that the present and future will only be different if we finally understand the past. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Mint
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Love between women comes of age with ‘Mrs Dalloway'
Ruth Vanita At 100, Virginia Woolf's classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality Natascha McElhone and Lena Heady in 'Mrs Dalloway' (1997). Gift this article A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman. Mrs Dalloway packs its startling originality into less than 64,000 words. James Joyce's Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing particularly important happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf loved to do, in the afternoon she rests, and in the evening, she gives a party. Mrs Dalloway is not about events. It reveals the horrors of war and the self-importance and egotism of colonial bureaucrats but its concern is with the pains and pleasures of individuals. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Clarissa experiences everything, from fresh morning air to meeting old friends, in two dimensions—the past and the present. She has a tranquil and affectionate marriage, but she fondly recalls Peter, the man she refused to marry because she found his insistence on sharing everything 'intolerable". Although their intimacy was exciting, she refused his proposal because she knew, with wisdom remarkable in a young woman, that 'a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house". This is a sentiment which anyone who has been married for many years would understand. It is also one with which the great heroines of English comedy, from Shakespeare's Rosalind to Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, would surely agree. A few pages into the novel, Clarissa thinks, with some guilt vis-à-vis her kind and considerate husband, about her lack of erotic warmth towards men, her 'cold spirit", which Peter too comments on. She knows, though, that she has felt for women 'what men felt". In an extraordinary passage, Woolf describes female desire in a way that evokes orgasm, specifically female orgasm: 'It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment." This is the best description of female orgasm I have ever read. As all great writing does, it colours precise description with something more than mere technical detail. The match burning in the crocus, like the Buddhist jewel in the lotus, lights up the world, connects the individual to the universe. Continuing to think about 'falling in love with women," Clarissa recalls her youthful love for her friend Sally Seton. She 'could not take her eyes off" Sally, she imbibed Sally's radical ideas about literature, society and life, she admired Sally's beauty as well as her reckless, unconventional behaviour. At first, Clarissa thinks that she cannot feel her old emotions again, but as she undresses and re-dresses, the feeling starts returning to her. As a young girl, dressing to meet Sally, she had felt, as Othello felt when he met his wife, 'if it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy." As she and Sally walked together at night, Clarissa remembers 'the most exquisite moment of her whole life" when Sally 'kissed her on the lips". She felt as if she had been given 'something infinitely precious," when Peter interrupted. The interruption was a painful shock to her. She compares it to running your face against a granite wall in the dark, and she also felt Peter's 'hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship." 'Mrs Dalloway' is not about events. It is about how we live as much in memory and imagination as in a house or a city. Mrs Dalloway is the first major novel in English to explicitly depict a woman falling in love with another woman. The year it was published, Woolf, who was 43 years old, began a passionate affair with the novelist Vita Sackville-West, who was a well-known lesbian and married to a gay man. In her diaries and letters, Woolf evokes Vita's 'incandescent" beauty in lyrical terms: 'she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung." Three years later, in 1928, when Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was censored, Woolf and her close friend, the novelist E.M. Forster, who was also gay, published a letter of protest. Hall refused their attempt to draft a statement that many writers were willing to sign, because Hall wanted them to defend the book on the basis of its literary merit, not merely on the basis of freedom of speech. Neither Woolf nor the other writers thought that The Well of Loneliness was a work of literary excellence. Nevertheless, Woolf was ready to testify in court on its behalf but the court ruled out all testimony and banned the book. The Well of Loneliness is a historically important book read mainly by scholars today; Mrs Dalloway is as vital and surprising now as it was when first published. Woolf's novel Orlando, published in 1928, is much acclaimed these days because it is about miraculous sex change and identity. Orlando is inspired by love. Woolf wrote it as a portrait of Sackville-West. But Orlando is not about love. It is a portrait of a remarkable bisexual person. Mrs Dalloway is a far greater novel than Orlando. At the end of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa hears about the suicide of a traumatised soldier, Septimus, who was married to a woman but loved a man who died in the war. Clarissa senses, almost mystically, that she is similar to Septimus and that he died holding on to the thing that matters most whereas she and her friends have let go of it. Is that thing love? Is it the ecstatic sense of oneness with the universe? She is not sure but she knows that it is obscured in her own life: 'closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy,' she had said to herself once, coming down in white." The novel ends with love—Peter filled with excitement at the sight of Clarissa, Clarissa's husband Richard with love for their daughter, and Sally's statement, 'What does the brain matter compared with the heart?" Ruth Vanita is a professor, translator and author, most recently of the novel A Slight Angle. Topics You May Be Interested In
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Let's Talk About ‘Mrs. Dalloway'
'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself': So reads one of the great opening lines in British literature, the first sentence of Virginia Woolf's classic 1925 novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway.' The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That's pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa's roving thoughts. On this week's podcast, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses it with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Laura Thompson. Other books mentioned in this episode: 'The Passion According to G.H.,' by Clarice Lispector 'A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,' by Eimear McBride 'The Lesser Bohemians,' by Eimear McBride 'To the Lighthouse,' by Virginia Woolf 'Orlando,' by Virginia Woolf 'A Room of One's Own,' by Virginia Woolf 'The Hours,' by Michael Cunningham 'Headshot,' by Rita Bullwinkel 'Tilt,' by Emma Pattee We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Telegraph
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Sadiq Khan is killing literary tradition. My great-aunt Virginia Woolf would be horrified
Walking through Westminster I always think of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf's words: 'One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night… a particular hush, or solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.' While Big Ben is now booming out across the city, there isn't much else that my great-aunt would recognise. London has changed quite a bit over the past few years, especially under Sir Sadiq Khan. The first London Mayor to win a third term, Khan has repeatedly pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital, to tackle air pollution, to increase living standards for Londoners, and to end crime on the streets. And yet in Westminster and across central London one is these days confronted by spreading tent encampments, roadworks and rubbish-strewn streets. One-way traffic systems are everywhere, pedestrianised zones, bike lanes weaving in and out of buses, and baffling roundabouts. Certainly devoted readers of Mrs Dalloway – the most popular and most 'London' of her books – many of whom are making the pilgrimage to Bloomsbury this Sunday to mark the novel's centenary, might not recognise the London of its pages. Born in Kensington in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a Londoner to her core, from her earliest years in Hyde Park Gate, the childhood walks around Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond, and visits to the South Kensington museums. As a young woman, London was the epicentre of her social life and creative milieu, as part of the famous Bloomsbury Group. This included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, the adventurous and sometimes scandalous group of artists, writers and political thinkers who (according to Dorothy Parker) had 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'. London was also the inspiration for Virginia's writing and her solace in low moods, as she struggled throughout her adult life with the depression which would eventually overwhelm her. She found escape from her thoughts through walking, or as she called it 'street-haunting'. She walked alone through Westminster, Regent's Park, Bloomsbury, unseen, collecting and absorbing the sights around her, always trying to capture some essence of the city and its people: 'I stop in London sometimes and hear feet shuffling. That's the language, I think; that's the phrase I should like to catch.' Clarissa Dalloway, just like her author, felt that walking in London was 'better than walking in the country', allowing her to escape and lose herself in 'that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'. The novel takes place on a single day, Wednesday 13 June 1923 (and this so-called 'DallowDay' is celebrated every year in the heart of Bloomsbury by wonderfully eccentric Virginia devotees from America and around the world). It follows the heroine from early morning through to the evening of the day on which she is giving a large formal party. Hence those evocative opening lines: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' Virginia adored W1 and the surrounding area, sending Clarissa Dalloway off to buy gloves on Bond Street. In her diary from the early 1920s, Virginia recalls 'a fine spring day. I walked along Oxford St. The buses are strung on a chain. People fight and struggle. Knocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident etc. To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.' So why isn't Sadiq Khan celebrating London's rich literary legacy? Our city streets are steeped in fictional characters, in the sights and sounds of our most famous literary scenes, the haunts and the houses of authors beloved the world over. It's not only Virginia's Bloomsbury and Clarissa Dalloway strolling through Westminster, it's Charles Dickens's Camden Town, Anthony Trollope's Mayfair, Wordsworth 's Westminster Bridge, Robert Louis Stevenson's Hampstead, Arnold Bennett 's Clerkenwell, Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street, to say nothing of George Orwell and Henry James – the list is endless. We should be shouting from the rooftops about London: not in a contrived 'city of culture' way, but to preserve our unique literary heritage and capitalise on it. Instead of the relentless virtue-signalling, the rainbow-painted crossings and the Windrush line, what about an Orlando line, a Pickwick line or a Sherlock Holmes line? Instead of which, taxi drivers taking tourists into these parts of central London are increasingly trapped and gridlocked – as a Bloomsbury cabbie said to me yesterday: 'It's a bloody nightmare.' There are a few blue plaques, but every one of the famous squares could display public information, art and writings from that iconic bohemian set. Children at London schools should be reading and visiting our best London authors, their houses and local streets, getting excited about growing up here. Instead of waging war on drivers with his low traffic neighbourhoods and Ulez schemes, the Mayor could focus on what's already here, he could welcome curious literary pilgrims from around the world and show off everything London has to offer. Instead of the rainbow flags, why not emblazon the images of our greatest London writers on the side of buses? Why not display their writings across the TfL network to inspire commuters and tourists as they travel across our capital city? At London airports too, we could welcome and inspire visitors with a reminder of our truly unique literary heritage. The irony is that Virginia Woolf would be a fabulous woke icon for the Mayor if only he knew it, the most rainbow of all writers, with her rumoured lesbian leanings and her passionate love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Just look at Virginia's gender-bending Orlando (1928) in which the main character transitions sex from male to female, a ground-breaking novel which she admitted to Vita 'is all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.' Instead of slapping a trigger warning QR code on her statue in Tavistock Square, why not celebrate her as a feminist and gay icon, and an experimental literary genius? One hundred years ago Virginia mused on London: 'For heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh… In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge, in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men, in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.'
Belfast Telegraph
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
A century of Clarissa: Why Mrs Dalloway will forever fascinate us
As Virginia Woolf's fourth novel turns 100, Katie Rosseinsky speaks to experts about how this dazzlingly experimental work still has readers and writers under its spell ©UK Independent In his 1998 novel The Hours, writer Michael Cunningham imagines Virginia Woolf sitting down to do battle with the draft of a book that will eventually become Mrs Dalloway. 'Can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?' his fictional version of the novelist ponders. The sweet, sad irony, of course, is that any reader of Mrs Dalloway knows that she needn't fret: the answer to Woolf's self-questioning is a resounding 'yes'. She is, in fact, working on a story so dazzling and expansive that it will prove irresistible to generations of readers to come, including writers like Cunningham. A century on from its debut, Woolf's fourth novel is 'as vital as ever', says Vintage Classics editor Charlotte Knight. To read it 100 years later is to be shocked by its immediacy and the sheer audacity of its experimentation; it's no wonder that contemporary authors are still in its thrall.
