Woolf funneled those ambitions into her story about a party. It was invested in finding new ways of seeing-other people, the world, the human soul. It arose with the camera, and the motion picture. But modernism was also a movement of exposure. It grappled with war, sickness, institutional breakdown, individual despair, and the bleak notion that problems might be solved if people could only be persuaded to buy the right stuff. Modernism was a movement of resonant rupture. In another way, though, the book’s revival makes perfect sense. Dalloway now,” one writer put it, as it became clear that a plague would be yet another way that the past would repeat itself within the heedless present.ĭalloway’s ubiquity, in one way, is curious: This moment would not seem to be clamoring for a story about a rich white woman running errands. Dalloway.” Essayists, too, have been revisiting the book, written in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, as a meditation on illness, as an insight into loneliness, as a reckoning with grief. Dalloway, from the Oxford professor and critic Merve Emre and Insignificance, which tells a Dalloway-inspired story from the perspective of a plumber and The Days of Afrekete, which revolves around a dinner party and pays homage to Woolf’s novel and Assembly, the electrifying fiction debut that has been called “a modern Mrs. There’s also the recent publication of The Annotated Mrs. This year brought a new edition of it, with a foreword by the author Jenny Offill. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel about a day in the life of a London society hostess, is enjoying a renaissance. That helps to explain the currency of a nearly 100-year-old piece of literature-a book, fundamentally, about a party. People are negotiating new ways of being in each other’s proximity. (“I’m sick of being perceived,” one woman said this summer, explaining why she would keep wearing her face mask outside despite relaxed CDC guidance on the matter.) But the internet has brought new acuity to the old experience of watching oneself being watched. Such transactions are not limited to the digital environment. Instagram, in that way, is both a choice and not a choice at all-a trap saturated in the language of easy freedoms: Post, comment, like. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.” Here, though, is another finding: Many of the same young people who spoke of Instagram’s degradations kept returning to the service anyway. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the company’s internal research revealed. In September, The Wall Street Journal published a report, based on leaked documents, describing Facebook’s awareness of the harmful effects one of its platforms was having on young people.

Dalloway novel