Wednesday 18 June 2025, 7-8:30pm, British Library, in person and online. Free for RSL Members and Fellows. Not a Member? Join now! Public tickets can be purchased from the British Library here from £6.50.
In her diary, Virginia Woolf revealed the aspiration for her novel Mrs Dalloway was to ‘give life and death, sanity and insanity…criticize the social system, and to show it …at its most intense.’
This year marks the centenary of the publication of the book. The novel which takes place around London on a Wednesday in mid-June, shaped the Modernist literary landscape and its impact endures.
Writing in The Guardian in 2016, Elaine Showalter called for a ‘Dalloway Day’ to be celebrated each year on a Wednesday in mid-June. Where better to mark this year’s Dalloway Day than the British Library, where draft manuscripts of the text, originally titled The Hours, are housed?
Join Improbable Theatre Director, Phelim McDermott, writer and director, Helen Tennison and scholars Merve Emre and Elaine Showalter in conversation with Bidisha on the enduring legacy of Mrs Dalloway, and the particular inspiration of the text in their work.
Ticketing
Tickets may be booked to attend in person, or to watch on our platform either live or during the next 7 days on catch up. If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. If you have specific access requirements please email [email protected].
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway.
Phelim McDermott is a founder member and co-Artistic Director of Improbable Theatre. He has won various awards such as an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment, TMA Awards for Best Touring Production and Best Director and a Critics Circle Best Designer Award. He was awarded a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts Fellowship. His produced an opera of ‘The Hours’ for The Metropolitan Opera, New York.
Elaine Showalter, critic, feminist, and leading scholar of women’s literature, is celebrated for her witty analysis of English and American literary and popular culture. A Professor Emerita at Princeton University where she taught for two decades, and a past president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Showalter is acknowledged to be a “founding mother” of the practice of feminist literary criticism. She received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism In 2003.Her books include A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing; Towards a Feminist Poetics ; Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
Helen Tennison has adapted and directed a production of Mrs Dalloway which will be performed at The London Library (11th-15th June) and in Oxford (19th-22nd June). She is an award-winning director and theatremaker, and formerly Co-Artistic Director of Drama Studio London, Helen specialises in site-responsive theatre, devising, Shakespeare and classics. Whilst Artist in Residence at the University of South Florida, Helen adapted and directed Woolf’s Orlando. She directed Dracula with Creation Theatre at the London Library. Recent productions include Navigating Margaret, a community show about living with dementia, and her absurdist performance lecture, Doggerland.
Bidisha is a broadcaster, presenter and journalist on screen, mic, film, page and stage. She writes for the main UK broadsheets (currently as a critic and columnist for The Observer and The Guardian), chairs events and features extensively across BBC TV and radio, CNN, Channel 5 and Sky News. Her fifth book is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London and her most recent publication is the essay The Future of Serious Art.
Presented in collaboration with the British Library.
