´óÏó´«Ã½

To mark the 70th anniversary of the death of Virginia Woolf (28 March), Philip Dodd presents a special Landmark edition of Night Waves devoted to one of her most famous novels, Mrs Dalloway.

Written in 1924, Mrs Dalloway is set on a single day in June, as socialite Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party. Elsewhere in London, a World War I veteran is suffering from shell-shock. Their days interweave as the preparations for the party get underway.
In the novel Virginia Woolf experiments with a new style of writing where the inner lives and thoughts of characters are as important as the stories they act out. Woolf also wanted to highlight social injustice: particularly the repression of woman and the treatment of the insane.

Mrs Dalloway has inspired many writers and film-makers, including Michael Cunningham, who used Woolf's story as the basis for his novel The Hours, which was then turned into an Oscar winning film by screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry.

Philip Dodd and his guests - Hermione Lee, Alison Light and Margaret Drabble - discuss what makes Mrs Dalloway such an intriguing and powerful novel, and explore Woolf's position as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
Producer: Fiona McLean.