Dalloway Day takes place every year on 'a Wednesday in mid-June'; the setting of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel Mrs Dalloway.

For Dalloway Day 2022 on 15 June, Kabe Wilson will be presenting a workshop exploring themes of class and social rank in Mrs Dalloway, with particular focus on Clarissa Dalloway's party. Taking a work of found poetry he assembled from the novel as a starting point, Kabe will encourage students to look at the text and its characters using a method akin to demographic data analysis, challenging them to apply this method to other literary works.

By looking in detail at the professions of those invited to and involved in arranging Clarissa’s party, Kabe will give students a framework for discussing parties in literature. Kabe hopes this will raise questions about how representations of class and other forms of social segregation can be at their most acute when characters are drawn together for leisure, and how this compares to our real-world experiences of social gatherings.

Kabe Wilson is a UK multimedia artist with a particular focus on adaptation across different forms. His work on Virginia Woolf includes ‘The Dreadlock Hoax’, a performance piece that adapted and inverted the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So, an extended experiment in literary recycling, and more recently 'On Being Still' (The Modernist Review #25), a series of paintings and writings that scrutinises his own engagement with the Bloomsbury Group within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter. More information about his work can be found here.

This workshop will be available from 9am on 15 June. If you would like access to this resource, please complete the form below and you will be emailed the link to access the video on the day.