Halle Mason is the winner of the Angelica Garnett Essay Prize with a paper that focuses on the Gothic, according to the fall issue of the International Virginia Woolf Newsletter.
Her essay, “A Modern Gothic: Septimus Smith Haunts the Streets of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” was written for Professor Emily James’s fourth-year course on The Metropolitan Mind at the University of St. Thomas.
Mason will receive $200 and her paper will be published in Issue 92 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
The essay was one of a number of excellent entries for the Garnett prize, but stood out for the readers as “an original, layered, and well informed” engagement with Woolf’s 1925 novel. In particular, the essay was noted for the author’s skilled application of literary terminology and genre theory.
Drawing upon a breadth of knowledge, the author establishes the gothic nature of the “horrors of the everyday” in a postwar context.
Working from “Street Haunting,” she moves to detailed analyses of Mrs. Dalloway, creating a memorable, persuasive, and insightful argument. – IVWS Newsletter