by Violet Woolf on Virginia Woolf’s London, the oil crisis as modernist subject matter, and what 1923 English literature says about 2026 English politics
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Mrs Dalloway, the Oil Price, and the Persistent Relevance of Everything
By Violet Woolf
I have been re-reading Mrs Dalloway. This is my fourth time through it and each time I read it in a different condition: the first time as an undergraduate who did not quite understand it, the second as a graduate student who understood it technically, the third during a difficult personal year when the stream-of-consciousness quality felt like accurate description rather than literary technique. This fourth reading is during an oil crisis and a political malaise and Woolf’s novel, written in 1925, in the aftermath of one catastrophic war and the gathering conditions of another, feels with each page less like historical literature and more like journalism filed ahead of schedule.
Clarissa Dalloway moves through London on a June morning in 1923 and the city she moves through is recovering and not recovering simultaneously: the shops are full, the preparations for her party are underway, the surface of things is organised and pleasant, and underneath it Septimus Warren Smith is disintegrating from what we would now call PTSD and what the novel calls, through the voices of his doctors, something that can be managed and must not be talked about. The parallel to the current management of difficulty is not subtle and Woolf did not intend it to be subtle, which is the thing about literary precision: it describes with accuracy what journalism describes with alarm and the accuracy outlasts the alarm by approximately a century.
The Irish Angle
I have also been following the Irish political situation this week with the attention that living partly in Woolf’s literary world gives you: a doubled consciousness, aware of the historical echoes in present events. Ireland’s relationship with British institutional decisions — the UK paying France for border management, the post-Brexit trade arrangements, the Northern Ireland protocol’s ongoing complications — continues to produce situations that feel simultaneously unprecedented and precisely predicted by the century of history that preceded them. Managing Britain’s institutional decline includes managing the consequences of decisions whose effects on Ireland were either not understood or not weighted appropriately when they were made.
Woolf’s London is also, structurally, a city managing its aftershocks. The parties continue. The preparations are made. The doctors advise rest and fresh air. Somewhere in the same city, Septimus looks out of windows. The oil price and the geopolitical crisis and the consumer confidence numbers and the licence fee are the 2026 version of the same doubled city. Mrs Dalloway knows it is there. She does not speak of it at her party. We have the party anyway. The novel is very good. The oil is still $107. The large language models cannot write Mrs Dalloway. This is, in the current climate, something to hold onto.
More at comedywriterinfo | The Daily Mash
