Is Virginia Woolf This Season’s Literary It Girl?

There is something about Virginia Woolf’s writing style that feels particularly resonant right now. A rush of words and images; mixing observations about consciousness with descriptions of what a local shop is selling; attempts to describe an entirely new reality. To read Mrs. Dalloway is to feel the better, smarter version of the infinite scroll, that piece of digital design that keeps us overly enthralled with our phones and uninterested in interacting with the real world. In Mrs. Dalloway, though, the flood of sensation, memory, information, and observation is mediated through one mind, Clarissa Dalloway’s. And Clarissa Dalloway experiences the very modern condition of not feeling like a full person at all. “Often now this body she wore … this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street.”

This is the same lament of a stream of TikToks about aging as a woman and perimenopause and the thousand other bits about growing older that millennials online like to pretend they are the first to name. This is the existential question behind the hundreds of articles about the loneliness epidemic and the loss of connection in our culture.

Woolf is top of mind this fall, as two of the modernist writer’s novels have been adapted for the screen: Night and Day, starring Lily Allen, Hayley Bennett, and Jennifer Saunders, and Clarissa, a retelling of Mrs. Dalloway set in present-day Lagos, directed by twin filmmakers Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri and starring Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, and Ayo Edebiri.

Woolf sought to articulate the dissolution of order between World War I and World War II. An entire generation, traumatized by the brutality and seeming pointlessness of the Great War, watched the institutions they had been told to believe in—the church, Empire, the social hierarchies (and the bonds that came with them)—crumble. “A lot of the modernists were responding to the rupture of the war,” explains Francesa Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, a history of Woolf and the artistic circles she encountered. “You really see that in several of her novels, a sense that the old forms were no longer sufficient to express the kind of fracturing of reality that they were seeing.” In a world made entirely new, Woolf and her fellow modernists broke artistic convention to capture the change and loss they were experiencing. Woolf herself sought ways to live and create art differently, participating in mixed-gender salons where men and women artists freely shared ideas, and writing about the constraints of gender in works like A Room of One’s Own.

That sense of multiplicity of perspectives and the lack of immediate understanding are what make Woolf feel familiar. “There was something about this novel that was very contemporary, even being a hundred years old as of last year, and that was really appealing,” Clarissa director Chuko Esiri told Deadline.

We are living in a time of dizzying technological, political, institutional, and moral disruption—very similar to the dissolution Woolf described. Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place during a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-WWI London. It’s a post-pandemic world (in this case, influenza). It’s a world, like our own, in which the political alliances and histories of the previous generation are suddenly, swiftly, irrelevant. “And that perhaps is another reason her work feels so modern that, in a way, we're still catching up to that break with the realist tradition,” says Wade.

But Virginia Woolf is also funny. This is her describing a woman who, in 2026, would probably be called out for being too performative. “Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she … she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it.”

It’s the importance of studying the everyday that makes Woolf feel perfect for this moment. She is as much concerned with describing the feeling of wearing the wrong hat to the function as she is with existential despair. “That's what she says in The Room of One's Own where she says women's books have been assumed to be frivolous and about conversations in the drawing room,” Wade says. “And then she's like, "But what is more interesting than gossip and fashion and clothes?” She didn't make those distinctions between high and low.”