100 years after its publication, Lucyl Harrison argues that Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway should be read as a pandemic novel that contends with the in/articulation of pandemic experience.
Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs Dalloway, set over a single day in June 1923 in the splintered environs of London, was published on May the 14th 1925. Celebrated for its stream-of-consciousness technique and psychological depth, it cemented its place in the literary canon and has retained its fame for a century. Yet amidst abundant scholarship on war trauma, shell-shock, memory, and time in the novel, one central force remains under acknowledged: the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic.
Mrs Dalloway captures the sociological and phenomenological sensations of the post-viral condition: fatigue, physical pain, and headaches. On the novel’s first page, Clarissa (the central figure of the novel) is described as having “grown very white since her illness,” her heart “affected, they said, by influenza” (Mrs Dalloway, p. 3). Clarissa’s physical fragility is consistently noted by Peter Walsh (Clarissa’s ex-lover), who sees her as ill and suffering (Ibid, p. 37). Despite such references, influenza’s impact on the narrative is neglected. I argue, however, that Woolf’s writing exists alongside the mutations of vocabulary on being ill: the attention to a crowded London, ambulances speeding people struck down by disease to hospital (p. 110), and “sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation” (p. 116). Mrs Dalloway should be read as a pandemic novel that embodies the aftermath of influenza and contends with the linguistic challenges of articulating viral experience.
Although one of history’s deadliest global pandemics, the relative silence amongst scholars and commentators on the presence of influenza in Mrs Dalloway reflects the broader cultural amnesia that obscures the 1918 pandemic and its entanglement with the First World War. Mark Honigsbaum, journalist, medical historian, and author of The Pandemic Century, claims that, apart from Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s fiction rarely mentions flu despite her own recurrent illnesses in the early 1920s (Honigsbaum, 2020: pp. 220–221). Elizabeth Outka argues that reading Mrs Dalloway as a pandemic novel requires shifting focus from overt references to its invisible, miasmic presence (Outka, 2019). Clarissa’s weakened heart, her fragility, and inward detachment, Outka suggests, are lingering traces of influenza. She frames Clarissa as a “post-pandemic survivor” whose body “still registers the virus’s lingering damage” (Ibid, 2019, p. 113).
This centenary of Mrs Dalloway revives Woolf’s musings on the limits of language in depicting disease and other maladies – musings which provide a new lens to reading COVID fiction. Woolf recorded fevers, headaches, exhaustion, and long periods in bed: symptoms that align with what Olivia Laing has called the “ominous gap” in her diary entries from 1925 (Laing, 2023: p. vii), emphasising that bouts of flu occurred during Woolf’s most creatively fruitful years. The ominous two-month diary gap in early 1925 coincides with Woolf’s redrafting of Mrs Dalloway and a bout of influenza. A later gap, in August 1925, coincides with Woolf fainting — an event that led to the writing of On Being Ill, composed in late autumn 1925 and published in January 1926 in The New Criterion, edited by T. S. Eliot. In her diary, Woolf wrote that On Being Ill was “one of my best,” but self-doubt set in after Eliot sent Woolf a postcard which voiced his tepid response to the essay (Bell, 2023: p. 61). Woolf reflected, “So, reading the proof just now, I saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it” (Bell, 2023, p.61).
In On Being Ill, Woolf critiques the English language’s failure to capture the realities of sickness:
“English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. […] let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (Woolf, 1926: p. 34).
This “poverty of language” is mirrored by scant depictions of illness in literature (Woolf, 1926: p. 34). Woolf suggests a novel devoted to influenza “lacks plot”, so what can be said of literary representations of COVID-19?
A Viral Legacy
Intriguing, then, that media responses to the Mrs Dalloway centenary overlook Woolf’s engagement with viral experience despite our own pandemic consciousness and the rise of vi-fi[1] during lockdown. Harriet Baker’s article on Mrs Dalloway omits any mention of influenza or its resonance in our post-pandemic condition (Baker, 2025). Naomi Milithorpe praises the novel’s “quotidian” legacy, positing how “Clarissa and Septimus Smith, though they never meet, are shadow versions of each other: Both have beaky noses, thin pale birdlike bodies, and histories of illness” (Milithorpe, 2025). Published on the centenary, Mark Hussey’s new book, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (Manchester University Press, 2025), dedicates its coda to “Twenty-first-century Dalloway,” including extended pandemic remarks on “Mrs Dalloway’s suddenly increased visibility in 2020,” and the anxious variations and connections made to the novel during lockdown (Hussey, 2025: pp. 177–179).
Mrs Dalloway’s 1923 setting positions Clarissa and Septimus Warren-Smith (a veteran from the Great War) as subjects of the ‘double’ traumas of war and pandemic, both having occurred five years prior. Choosing 1923, rather than immediately postwar, opens space to consider how Woolf coded the pandemic aftermath into her protagonists’ lives. In 2025, we are five years on from COVID-19: a global event whose full social and psychological impacts remain unknown. Contemporary fiction responds to the pandemic, often subtly, in a literary mode I’ve coined “quiet COVID novels.” Texts like The Details by Ia Genberg and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, for example, avoid explicit mention of coronavirus, placing the pandemic in the background.
Whilst Mrs Dalloway is widely referenced for its influence on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (the film companion, of which is a common centenary citation, features Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughn), Woolf is also the blueprint for Cunningham’s ‘quiet COVID’ novel, Day (2024). Structured around one day on April 5, revisited in 2019, 2020, and 2021, Day never names COVID, yet its narrative reflects the pandemic’s before, during, and after. Day imports Woolf’s approach to time and virus-haunted silences into the COVID pandemic: Robbie, a central character, retreats into an online persona named “Wolfe,” contracts the virus and dies.
On or around March 2020, human character changed
In Woolf’s subtle references to influenza and her exploration of the language of illness, we find the germ of a preoccupation that now defines our literary epoch. One hundred years on, Woolf’s question remains: have we yet found the language for illness? Revisiting Mrs Dalloway through a pandemic lens offers not only deeper appreciation of Woolf’s novel, but a framework for reading the aftermath of COVID-19.
Through my doctoral research and interviews on Pandemic Pages, a podcast I created to archive literary responses to the pandemic and curate a COVID-19 bookshelf, Catherine Wynne and I have spoken with authors about writing COVID fiction and non-fiction: Clare Pollard (Delphi) noted the “initial footrace” to write the first COVID novel; Kylie Lee Baker (Bat Eater), described how publishers advised against writing a COVID narrative; and Lucy Easthope, the UK’s leading emergency planner, shared that literary festival audiences showed reluctance to engage with COVID fiction at all. Publishers and readers then, as now, may have resisted stories of viral illness – a notion Pandemic Pages seeks to explore and challenge. Reflecting on our current literary moment, I recall how Jodi Picoult, author of the COVID novel Wish You Were Here, commented: “I think five years from now people are going to want to push this so far into the rear-view mirror they wouldn’t be able to sit down and read a book that really asks them: what did you lose? What did you learn? And what are you going to do with that?” (Picoult, 2021).
Alison Gibbons said in 2017, there was “little sign of a radical literary Avant Garde […] sweeping away the old to make way for the new” (Gibbons, 2017). Then came 2020, and a cohort of COVID authors writing across this new, literary pandemicscape, charting the shift from our old world to the new normal. On the podcast, Roddy Doyle, author of two pandemic novels, defined our current condition as split into pre- and post- COVID ages, “a new way of thinking, a new way of living”. This can be applied to a new way of writing too, where Coronavirus-conscious literature centres isolation thematically, embeds quietly apocalyptic pandemic plots,situates the temporal dislocations of lockdown, and employs deeply uncomfortable narrative perspectives that prompt us to confront the crisis.
COVID-era novels owe a debt to Woolf, who illustrated that illness, though difficult to express, leaves traces. One hundred years after Mrs Dalloway, we continue to encounter a new world of Coronavirus fiction that Woolf mapped in her novel and considered in On Being Ill: one where silence reverberates, trauma percolates, and language strains. If recent COVID-19 pandemic fiction is any sign, however, we are, at last, learning to speak it.
[1] “Vi-fi, short for virus fiction, describes contemporary fiction that features the devastating events of world-changing outbreaks and epidemics. Rooted in science fiction, vi-fi draws on bio-thrilling realism and parallel worlds with multiple, dystopian possibilities” (Harrison & Wynne, 2024).
About the author
Lucyl Harrison is a doctoral candidate with the Living with Death: Learning from COVID cluster at the University of Hull, researching viral experience in pandemic literature, focusing on Covid-19 fiction. She is founder and co-host of Pandemic Pages podcast which interviews authors, academics, and creative voices, and is a ‘Story Maker’ for the National Centre for Writing.
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