Yiyun Li, author
This past semester I taught The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which is less read and talked about than her other books – to my undergraduates. One of the most interesting things about it is that Richard and Clarissa Dalloway appear as minor characters at the beginning. In each of my rereadings (and for my students who read the novel for the first time), when the Dalloways leave, it feels as though the air pressure of the novel drops for a moment. A reader feels a longing and a wistfulness watching them disappear – a feeling that Woolf must have shared too. The Dalloways must have haunted her and waited for her to become a more mature writer.
