Reading Group Center




“How Have I Not Read This?” February Book Club Pick

HHINRT_MrsDalloway_675_Post_1Join Michael Cunningham, Sarah McNally, and Vintage Books’s Diana Secker Tesdell for a live, virtual discussion of Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel Mrs. DallowayMichael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours drew inventively and masterfully on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of characters struggling with love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel received the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. In 2002, The Hours was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore. Perhaps most significantly, The Hours introduced an entire generation of readers to Virginia Woolf and, specifically, Mrs. Dalloway.

In his introduction to the new Vintage Classics edition of Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham writes: “Mrs. Dalloway is a revolutionary novel…a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials. Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life.” We hope you will join Michael and the rest of us in reading Mrs. Dalloway and discussing it at our next meeting of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group’s “How Have I Not Read This?” book club. Read along with us at #HowHaveINotReadThis

Find out more about the book.


Event Details:

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19. Register here and add to your calendar.

• EVENT START: 7:00 PM ET (or shortly after once all are checked in)

• Hosted in partnership with McNally Jackson. You can order Mrs. Dalloway from them HERE.

• NOTE: This is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom—you will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing and sufficient Internet access. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.

Featured Participants:
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at Brooklyn College. He is currently senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.

SARAH McNALLY founded McNally Jackson Books and Goods for the Study in New York City.

DIANA SECKER TESDELL is an editor for Vintage Books and Everyman’s Library in the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. She is also the editor of more than a dozen anthologies, including New York Stories, Love Stories, and Stories of Art and Artists.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other novels, including To the Lighthouse and Orlando.