In class, the students and I thought about what it meant to see Clarissa as a character who has lived through a pandemic and come out the other side. Clarissa wants to buy the flowers herself because she is delighted to go out – as we might appreciate – having spent so long indoors. The novel’s famous opening line – “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” – has taken on new resonance this year as the pandemic has made all our worlds much smaller. Virginia Woolf on the magic of going to the cinema We meet Mrs Dalloway as she weaves her way through London, experiencing the quiet intensity of life one morning in June. The protagonist of Mrs Dalloway is a survivor of the Spanish flu of 1919 and the sense of life that permeates the text emerges from her experience of rediscovering the pleasures of life.

Mrs Dalloway provided an entry point to make sense of the business of studying and thinking while a new national emergency unfolded around us. I’m a lecturer in English at Cardiff University, and teaching literature in a sparsely filled lecture theatre during the pandemic has been a discombobulating experience. Reading Woolf’s work, particularly her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, on the 80th anniversary of her death and in the midst of our own pandemic, we see how she tried to rewrite death and illness back into the national story of post-first world war glory and strength. But here she suggests that what illness promises to bring is the end of the profit of war that fuels the nationalist sentiments churned out by the newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe’s vast empire of popular journalism. She would later appreciate the seriousness the threat of influenza posed. She documents the experience of the Spanish flu in her diary in 1918, noting, as an aside, how “we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since The Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe and thus precipitate us into peace.” Woolf came down with several bouts of influenza between 19 and needed to confine herself to bed for stretches of time. It renders everyone potentially vulnerable. Influenza moves in invisible and unpredictable ways. In illness, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf observed, “We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright we become deserters.” Woolf, writing in the wake of the first world war, saw the threat that the Spanish flu of 1919 posed to the stories of national triumph. Illness, unlike war, as English academic and writer Elizabeth Outka brilliantly demonstrates in her book Viral Modernism (2019), is a story that easily slips out of cultural and historical memory.

Virginia woolf's dalloway