She has long been admired by students of English literature, but 85 years after her death, Virginia Woolf has burst out of the seminar room to become an unexpected cultural phenomenon.
The author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, whose innovative prose helped redefine the modern novel, is finding a new audience through a series of high-profile adaptations.
This Friday sees the release of Virginia Woolf’s Knight and Day, an adaptation of Woolf’s novel of the same name. Starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall and Lily Allen, this romantic comedy is about a female astronomer whose carefully arranged life is disrupted when she becomes embroiled in a love triangle – forcing her to confront romantic desire and the patriarchal expectations of Edwardian society. Clarissa – a modern reimagining of Mrs Dalloway set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria – became the talk of Cannes last month.
“I’ve been a huge fan of Virginia Woolf for a long time,” said Tina Gharavi, director of Knight and Day. “She was an iconic lesbian author who wrote about intimate personal experience. I thought the way she carried herself in a world that minimized women’s stories and voices was extraordinary.”
Gharavi, the British-Iranian filmmaker behind the BAFTA-nominated I Am Nasreen, said she was initially in discussions for 2018’s Vita & Virginia, the biographical romantic drama about Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West that inspired Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. In Night and Day, he and screenwriter Justin Waddell have expanded Wolf’s single reference to astronomy into the emotional center of the film.
“I wasn’t familiar with Knight and Day, but when I read it I immediately connected to Katherine Hilbery’s story, her ambition and fear of love, as at that time it often led to children and domestic slavery. She wanted to escape that, and I understood that,” Gharavi said.
“I was also curious about why Virginia was writing this book. There was something beautiful about this woman who wants to be an astrophysicist, who just looks at the sky. I loved the metaphor of looking at the sky as a woman’s perspective of existence – how silly it is to limit women to lesser roles, with all these social customs and barriers to fulfillment.”
Gharavi said that it felt serendipitous to make the film “while living with the consequences of the Iranian war”. While Woolf wrote Night and Day in 1919, she set it in 1910, at the height of global conflict.
“There must have been a reason for choosing that moment,” Gharavi said. “Most people like Ralph Denham would have gone to war and died.
“Wolf also wrote this book when she was in a mental institution, but it’s really a romantic comedy – it’s smart and funny. That’s what’s great about comedy, and why we need a movie like this. We need to be able to understand how difficult it is to live right now – with war, with genocide. We need to be reminded of our better selves and the thing that connects us all is laughter.”
Clarissa, which stars Sophie Okonedo alongside David Oyelowo and Ayo Adebiri, is the story of a high-society woman preparing to host a party in Lagos, where she unexpectedly encounters people from her past.
The film, directed by brothers Eri and Chuko Esiri, is expected to be widely screened on 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 told the New York Times. Over time, he began to see “fragments of all the people I knew, stored in these characters”.
He said that present-day Nigeria and 1920s England were “highly similar… especially in how conservative the cultures are.” The brothers also named a writing desk Virginia. “(Chucko) literally says things like, ‘I’ve got a meeting with Virginia’,” Ari Esiri said.
Woolf’s work has long proven suitable for adaptation due to its deeply internal nature – its focus on consciousness, voiceover and monologue. This quality is based on Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), which follows the lives of three women engaged to Mrs. Dalloway. Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), starring Tilda Swinton, offered a more radical interpretation of Woolf’s spirit, turning her novel into a playful, gender-fluid meditation on identity and time.
This spring, a stage adaptation of The Waves was a critical hit at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre, while a touring production of Mrs Dalloway, starring Kit Green in 16 roles, has also attracted attention.
Beyond stage and screen, Woolf’s presence has also spread into more widespread corners of contemporary culture, particularly among younger audiences, who circulate quotes from Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own on social media.
In another sign of that cultural rebirth, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup, opens in London’s West End this autumn. Revival is being organised. Although the title is not based on any of Woolf’s texts, it reflects how her name has become shorthand for a kind of intellectual, emotionally volatile internal drama.
“She invented a type of novel that focused on women’s lives, we owe her a debt of gratitude,” said Gharawi, who teaches at Newcastle University. “Woolf was a modernist and I think we should be modernists in making adaptations relevant today. What would Virginia think and do today? I’m sure she would say: Make it more radical. That’s why we have black, queer, trans characters in our story.”
Gharavi said that audiences need to “find their relationship” with Woolf. “We still don’t have women’s voices equal to men’s, even today, 100 years after I wrote this book. It’s crazy. There has to be a reason she’s in the zeitgeist. She’s more relevant now than ever.”
