The many loves of 'Mrs Dalloway'

At 100, Virginia Woolf's classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality

- Ruth Vanita

A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, my favourite of all her novels. From the time English novels first appeared in the 18th century, many of them were named after women—Moll Flanders (1722, by Daniel Defoe), Clarissa (1748, by Samuel Richardson), Evelina (1778, by Frances Burney), Emma (1815, by Jane Austen). Most of their heroines are young women and most novels are about falling in love and getting married. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is unusual because it is about a 51-year-old woman, a wife and mother, who has experienced more than one love, and the love of whose life was a woman.

Mrs Dalloway packs its startling originality into less than 64,000 words. James Joyce's Ulysses, published three years earlier in 1922, is about four times as long. Both novels are about one day in the life of one person. Nothing particularly important happens on this day. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks in London, as Woolf loved to do, in the afternoon she rests, and in the evening, she gives a party.