On turning the age of Mrs. Dalloway

It was sort of shocking, when re-reading Mrs. Dalloway recently, to make this discovery: I was now her age exactly.

I’m not sure why I found this so immediately haunting. In part, I suppose, I’ve always thought of Clarissa and Peter and Richard and Sally Seaton as older than they are – Clarissa’s illness perhaps aging her beyond her years; fifty-one in 1925 being older than fifty-one now (I will offer myself that solace). But the idea that I had caught up to her somehow echoed through me.

I've explored my passion about Virginia Woolf's novel in this essay, published on Literary Hub: The Best of the Literary Internet.