Clarissa Dalloway’s Global Itinerary: From London to Paris and Sydney

Abstract

Almost a century after its publication, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) continues to endure and influence many international contemporary writers. This chapter focuses on three contemporary women writers who have authored recent novels inspired by Mrs Dalloway and who have revived Dalloway-esque themes within a renewed spectrum of aesthetic, cultural and political contexts. From direct, intended homages to Woof’s Mrs Dalloway to more subtle allusions, Anne Korkeakivi (An Unexpected Guest, 2012), Carole Llewellyn (Une ombre chacun, 2017) and Gail Jones (Five Bells, 2011) have taken their own twenty-first-century Clarissa Dalloway to Paris and Sydney. These cities, with their topographic, historical and cultural specificities, function as the canvas for the contemporary characters’ wanderings. Korkeakivi, Llewellyn and Jones perpetuate Woolf’s Dalloway-isms, but they also make them new by adapting them to contemporary expectations, settings and situations.