One Hundred Years of "Mrs. Dalloway"

I'm a bit later to my daily blogging than usual.  In part, it's because I slept a bit later.  In part, it's because I fell down a bit of an internet rabbit hole when I discovered that it's the 100th anniversary of the publishing of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway--yes, 100 years ago on this very day, May 14.  

I really enjoyed the essays on Lithub, particularly this one which talked about teaching the book to today's students and this one which talked about reading the book before and after the pandemic:  "Emre, who worked on The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway in 2020, says the endeavor was an especially apt pandemic project: 'It’s a novel that is registering the aftershocks of a moment of unprecedented mass death. It is deeply preoccupied with different systems of keeping time after it feels like there has been a massive historical rupture in the world.'”

Reading the essays made me think about Michael Cunningham's The Hours, both the first time I read it when I was commuting by public transit to my teaching job at the University of Miami in 2001, and the last time that I read it in 2017, which I talked about in this blog post.  I found his braiding of three narratives so compelling.  I started thinking of my own braided narrative, but in the end, I only wrote one of the braids, and I wrote it like a traditional novel.

At this point in my narrative, you might be expecting publication information, but I never published it, and I'm not sure I ever sent it out.  I reread it years ago, and a friend read it more recently and wondered why I never did anything with it.  I was discouraged and tired.  It was about a poet in her 40's who enters into a partnership with a younger musician/poet, and the whole thing blossomed into a love story, which delighted me, but also aggravated me because all of my novels turn into love stories, even when I plan differently.  I stopped writing my apocalyptic novel in part because it was turning into a love story, but also in part, because I was scaring myself with plot details that were coming true.

Now I am thinking of new projects, a new narrative that might weave the voice of an older woman in seminary, a younger woman teaching section after section of freshman comp in a community college, a middle aged woman struggling to write poems around the edges of her administrator job--and yes, they would all be me.

I am also thinking of a new novel that could use all the old novels I have that aren't published.  I am intrigued by the idea of cutting and pasting bits into a new manuscript, a collage that I suspect I wouldn't be able to make coherent.

But first, let me reread Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours.  I've spent time this morning ordering various copies through my delightful public library.  Now that I'm done with seminary, I'm looking forward to having time to read different delights, to think about my creative writing differently (or even, just to do more creative writing).