Bring out the cardies and cocktails – it’s time we celebrated Dallowday

Ulysses has given Dublin Bloomsday, so why can’t London raise a glass to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway?

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in a single city on a single day: London on 13 June 1923. But while Bloomsday on 16 June is the occasion of riotous celebrations in Dublin and around the world, the day of Mrs Dalloway’s party is ignored. I think Dallowday is a date worth celebrating – it should be the occasion of readings, exhibitions, performances and revelry. Why is Leopold Bloom more important than Clarissa Dalloway? How did Dublin get to own a single day in literary history, and London miss out?

Mrs Dalloway is both a modernist masterpiece and one of the great novels about London. Many London tours already offer Dalloway walks, following the paths of Clarissa, her daughter Elizabeth, her former suitor Peter Walsh, and her suicidal double Septimus Smith. London (along with New York) is the place where Dalloway scholars come to work. The large notebooks containing Woolf’s handwritten draft of “The Hours” – her working title for Mrs Dalloway – are in the British Library, which would be the perfect venue for an exhibit and a conference. London is also crowded with places, artefacts, images and souvenirs of the novel, from postcards at the National Portrait Gallery to teas at Dalloway Terrace in Bloomsbury.

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