A century after Virgina Woolf published this queer classic, how has it impacted pop culture today?
BY EMILY WARNER, IMAGE BY CURZON FILM
Earlier this month, the Virginia Woolf Society commissioned and installed a blue plaque on London’s Clifford’s Inn, where Woolf lived with her husband Leonard Woolf. The couple had just returned from their honeymoon and the new plaque cements their status as Mr and Mrs Woolf in careful, white lettering. Yet this year marks 100 years since Woolf established a very different legacy as a queer pioneer. In 1925, she wrote her extraordinary novel Mrs Dalloway, whose protagonist Clarissa flounders in a loveless partnership and fantasises about kissing a girl – hardly a depiction of marital bliss.
“She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life…Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!”
A modern-day Clarissa Dalloway would probably have dumped her husband Richard, and run away with Sally Seton. But the novel we have is Mrs Dalloway, and not Mrs Seton, precisely because it was written 100 years ago, at a time when many considered lesbianism a “perversion”. This is not to say that lesbian relationships didn’t exist – Woolf famously had an affair with Vita Sackville-West, a glamorous British socialite, and many of her contemporaries were also involved in lesbian romances. But the work of sexologists like Richard Von-Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud promoted the idea that sex between two women was a mental illness. There were multiple attempts to criminalise lesbianism such as the 1921 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which only failed out of fear that such a law might encourage more women to engage in lesbianism.
Yet this hasn’t stopped Virginia Woolf from becoming an icon of the sapphic zeitgeist, beloved for the way she bucked convention both on and off the page. In 1926, she wrote to Sackville-West, “Look here Vita – throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight, and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head.” Vita’s letters in return were equally effusive and passionate, crammed full of sexual euphemisms and nicknames. She famously wrote, “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.”
In 1997, Mrs Dalloway was adapted for the screen by the lesbian Dutch film director Marleen Gorris. It starred Vanessa Redgrave and Natascha McElhone as Clarissa Dalloway, and Lena Headey as the young Sally Seton. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin says the film, “drifts easily between past and present, romance and pragmatism, hope and despair” with a powerful depiction of youthful ardour “when Clarissa found herself in a flirtation with the pretty, headstrong Sally Seton”.
Then, in 2002, Stephen Daldry directed The Hours, a psychological period drama based on the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham. The story follows three generations of women whose lives have been shaped by Mrs Dalloway. In 2001, Clarissa Vaughan organises a party for her friend who is suffering from AIDS; in 1951, Laura Brown is a pregnant housewife trapped in an unhappy marriage; in 1920s England, Virginia Woolf pens the novel Mrs Dalloway while battling her own mental illness. The film captures the legacy of Woolf through the ages, and in particular, her profound influence on the LGBTQIA community.
With the new plaque on Clifford’s Inn, her name is literally cemented into the history of London as Leonard’s wife. But as we approach the 100-year anniversary of Mrs Dalloway, she also represents a powerful queer history – her words continue to resonate for women who love women, at a time when Mrs Seton might be possible.
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