BBC Radio 4 has just aired a short series about the writer Virginia Woolf, to celebrate the centenary of her novel Mrs Dalloway. According to the publicity blurb, the aim of Three Transformations of Virginia Woolf was to explore what she “has to say to us today”, and how she “captured and critiqued a modern world that was transforming around her, treated mental health as a human experience rather than a medical condition, and challenged gender norms”.
Because the three episodes immediately followed the Today programme, I distractedly caught two minutes of the first, before flinching, and turning it off. The reason? Only a few days before, I had read a diary entry Woolf wrote in 1915, presented alongside the acknowledgment that she was “suffering deep trauma at the time”, but still so shocking that it made me catch my breath.
