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Long beloved by students of English literature, but 85 years after his death, Virginia Woolf has come out of the seminar room into an unexpected culture.
The author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, whose innovative prose helped reinterpret the modern novel, is finding new audiences through high-quality adaptations.
This Friday sees the release of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day in cinemas, based on Woolf’s novel of the same name. The romcom, starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall and Lily Allen, is about a female astronaut whose well-planned life goes awry when she becomes entangled in a romantic subplot – forcing her to confront the romantic desires and expectations of her Edwardian parents. Clarissa – a a modern adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway in Lagos, Nigeria – became the talk of Cannes last month.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Virginia Woolf,” says Night and Day director Tina Gharavi. “She was a well-known feminist writer who wrote about her own experiences. I thought she was amazing in the way she carried herself in a world that limited the myth and voice of women.”
Gharavi, the British-Iranian filmmaker behind the Bafta-nominated I Am Nasrine, said he was initially in talks about. 2018 Vita & Virginiaa romantic drama about Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West that inspired Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. In Night and Day, he and cinematographer Justine Waddell add one of Woolf’s astronomical quotes to the center of the film.
“I didn’t know about Night and Day, but when I read it I immediately connected with the story of Katharine Hilbery, her desire and fear of love, because at that time it often led to children and domestic slavery. She wanted to avoid this, and I understood,” said Gharavi.
“I was also curious to know why Virginia was writing this book. There was something beautiful about this woman who wants to be an astronomer, looking up at the sky. I loved the illustration of a woman looking up at the sky as she sees existence – how ridiculous it is to reduce women to limited roles, with all the social conditions and barriers to achieving it.”
Gharavi said it was difficult to make the film and deal with the “consequences of the Iran war”. While Woolf wrote Night and Day in 1919, she set it in 1910, at the height of World War I.
“There must be a reason why he chose that time,” Gharavi said. “Many men, like Ralph Denham, would have gone to war and died.”
“Woolf also wrote the book while he was in a mental hospital, but it’s really a romcom – it’s a smart and funny flick. That’s what’s so good about comedy, and that’s why we need a film like this. We need to be able to cope with how difficult it is to live now – with war, with murder. We need to be reminded of our good life and what unites us all.”
Clarissa, who is the star Sophie Okonedo along with David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, follows a high society woman planning to host a party in Lagos, where she unexpectedly meets figures from the past.
Directed by brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the film is expected to be screened at the autumn festival circuit. Chuko Esiri first read Woolf’s novel as a teenager at a British boarding school. “I didn’t understand it, but I felt it,” he said he told the New York Times. After a while, he began to see “pieces of everyone I knew stored in these letters”.
He said modern Nigeria and 1920s England were “very similar… especially in terms of culture”. The brothers also named the writing desk Virginia. “(Chuko) says things like, ‘I have a meeting with Virginia’,” Arie Esiri said.
Woolf’s work has been revolutionary because of its internal nature – a focus on knowledge, vocabulary and individuality. This character inspired Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), which revolved around the lives of three women connected to Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando’s Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), starring Tilda Swinton, reinterpreted Woolf’s spirit, turning her novel into a fun, thoughtful meditation on gender and time.
This spring, The Waves show at London’s Jermyn Street theatre it was very difficultwhile Mrs. Dalloway’s live show, with Kit Green playing 16, has also attracted attention.
Beyond the stage and screen, Woolf’s presence has permeated many aspects of contemporary culture, especially among young audiences, who broadcast quotes from Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own on television.
In another sign of the afterlife, this autumn in London’s West End has a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?and Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup. Although not taken from any of Woolf’s writings, the title shows how her name has come to be shorthand as a witty, unflappable inner drama.
“She created a book that has a huge impact on women’s lives, we have to thank her,” said Gharavi, who also teaches at Newcastle University. “Woolf was a modernist and I think we have to be modernists in how we make change necessary today. What would Virginia think and do today? I believe she would say: make it more powerful. That’s why we have dark, unstructured, revolutionary people in our story.”
Gharavi said the audience should “find their own relationship” with Woolf. “We don’t have women’s voices equal to men’s, even today, 100 years after he wrote that book. That’s crazy.
