Even though all but the evening party is sold out, I want to get this event on the record. In collaboration with the Virginia Woolf Society Great Britain, Hatchard – Piccadilly will present an afternoon of events to celebrate DallowayDay 2025, the centenary celebration of Mrs. Dalloway.
Date and time: Starts on Saturday, 28 Jun 2025, 11:30 a.m. BST
Location: London – Hatchards – Piccadilly, 187 Piccadilly London W1J 9LE United Kingdom
The schedule
11:30 a.m. – 12.30 p.m.: A Bloomsbury Walk
Guided by Clara Jones, author of Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist, we will haunt and saunter in the streets and squares of Virginia Woolf’s beloved Bloomsbury.[Please note: the walk is available only for those with All Day Tickets.]
2 – 3 p.m.: In Conversation with Maggie Gee and Michelle de Kretser.
Hatchards bookshop on Piccadilly will hold an in-conversation with authors Michelle de Kretser and Maggie Gee on Virginia Woolf in the 21st century chaired by Maggie Humm, author of Talland House and The Bloomsbury Photographs.
Michelle de Kretser is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, renowned for bending fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to explore the boundaries between life and art. In her new novel, Theory & Practice, we meet a young woman newly arrived in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ into disarray.
3 – 4 p.m.: book signing, informal meet-the-authors, soft drinks & cupcakes.
For the second panel of the afternoon, the program will mark the centenary of Mrs Dalloway’s publication by welcoming Mark Hussey to discuss his new book Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel in conversation with Vara Neverow.
In her diary, Virginia Woolf wrote that she wanted her new novel ‘to give life & death, sanity & insanity… to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.’
In conversation with Vara Neverow, managing editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and former president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, Mark Hussey discusses how Virginia Woolf achieved this creative ambition: from the first stirrings that appeared in her diary through to the struggle she had in moulding and developing characters and storyline. Once published, Mrs Dalloway was recognised almost immediately as a major development in prose fiction, and Mark traces its remarkable legacy through one hundred years to the present day. Sarah Hall, VWSGB Publicity Officer and Co-Editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, will chair the panel.
After the event, Mark will also be available to sign copies of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel.
5 p.m. onwards: Mrs Dalloway’s Party
There are a few tickets left for this party to celebrate publication of The Hatchards Library edition of Mrs Dalloway with a glass of wine and live jazz with Wayne McIntyre and guests showcasing a repertoire from the 1920s.
