I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source.

Call this Mrs. Dalloway's podcast.

We're reading classic fiction from a century ago

for light on the strangeness of the world in our day,

or maybe just for relief, reading a great old book.

The dazzling young critic Mervais Emory is our guest

and our guide to Virginia Woolf's

modernist's masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway, from 1925.

The novel is a day in the life or a slideshow in the mind of a rich ruling class lady in London,

volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street

on a morning in June, for a party she'll be giving at home that evening.

But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside Rapture.

The second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World

War I, broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because in his madness,

he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived.

Welcome, Mervais M. Ray. We owe you big time for your annotated edition of Mrs. Dalloway.

You write, together, the sane and insane love of life created the frame for Virginia Woolf's novel. To my mind, that makes it

a sort of a prophetic parable of the disarray in our own world, in our heads in 2025. What connections

do you draw out of the novel into our world a hundred years later? Ah, well, thank you so much for having me. Maybe I can

draw a couple of connections between the day on which Mrs. Dalloway throws our party and the days

that we are living through, trudging through perhaps now. So when I started annotating Mrs. Dalloway, it was March

2020, a memorable month for so many of us. And then at that point, there was a very direct

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