 Hello and welcome to our last discussion of Dalloway Day 2022, the fifth year of the RSL's Dalloway Day. I'm Molly Rosenberg, Director of the Royal Society of Literature and I'm very happy to welcome you today from wherever you're watching to celebrate Virginia Woolf's life and work alongside the RSL and our partners, the British Library. You can catch more on Dalloway Day through our friends BBC Radio 3. Today, you join us for a party planning panel discussion between Mervé Emery, Elaine Showalter, Kabe Wilson and Irena Sinocoji. Mrs Dalloway's party is one of literature's best known social occasions, but what if Virginia Woolf herself had been the hostess? Who would have been on the guest list? What would they have talked about? Our speakers will tell us who they think would have made the cut and why, and their whole discussion will be introduced with a poetry performance from Kabe, interrogating class and capitalism in Mrs Dalloway. If you're looking after this for more things Dalloway, head to the Royal Society of Literatures website for more events from this year and previous years, or visit our partners, the British Library for Virginia Woolf manuscripts and articles online. Before Kabe, I am welcoming Irena Sinocoji, who will be guiding conversation today. Irena Sin is a Nigerian-British writer. Elected to the Royal Society of Literature as a fellow in 2018, her short stories have been published internationally. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, was published in 2015, for which she was a recipient of a 2016 Betty Trask Award. Her short story collection, Speak Gargantula, was published in 2016. It was shortlisted for the inaugural Jalak Prize and the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. A collection of short stories, Newdy Brank was published in 2019. It was again longlisted for the Jalak Prize in 2020. Story Grace Jones won the 2020 A.K.O. Cain Prize for African Writing. In 2021, she was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature, very well deserved, I can say. A novel, Curandira is forthcoming this year in 2022. She is Vice-Chair of the Royal Society of Literature's governing council, and before Irena Sin will have an introduction from Kabe Wilson. 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Lady, colonial administrator, colonial administrator. Lady, lady, colonial administrator. Politicians, member of parliament. Lady, merchants, manufacturers. Lady, colonial administrator. Lady, lady, colonial administrator. Member of parliament. Member of parliament. Member of parliament. Colonial administrator. Colonial administrator. Lady, factory owner. Colonial administrator. Servants. Lady, factory owner. Lady, Queen of France. Lady, Queen of France. Colonial administrator. Lady, colonial administrator. I'm thrilled to be moderating this Dalloway Day event for the RSL in partnership with the British Library celebrating the ever-fascinating, inspiring Virginia Woolf, a writer who remains indelible in our imaginations, whose body of work continues to enrich our literary landscape. Today we explore what would happen if Virginia Woolf threw a dinner party open to any guest throughout history. Joining me to discuss this scintillating topic are three brilliant writers Mervé Emery, Elaine Shoalwater, and Kabe Wilson. I'd like to introduce our guest without further ado. Mervé Emery is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary, The Making of Bad Readers in Post-War America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and CBC and informs the CNN HBO Max Documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of The Annotated Mrs Dalloway and the Norton Modern Library, Mrs Dalloway. Elaine Shoalwater is a Professor Emery at Princeton and former Chair of the Judges of the Booker International Prize. Her books include a literature of their own British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing, and a jury of her peers, American women writers from Annie Bradstreet to Annie Prelue, Between Women, The Correspondents Between Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, edited by Elaine Shoalwater and English Shoalwater, which will be published by Virago later this year. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and one of the instigators of Dalloway Day. Carbet Wilson is a UK multimedia artist with a particular focus on adaptation across different forms. His work on Virginia Woolf includes The Dreadlock Hosts, a performance piece that adapted and inverted the infamous Dreadlock Hosts of 1910, Olivia Ungwafri of One Woman or So, an extended experiment in literary recycling, and more recently, on Being Still, the Modernist Review 25, a series of paintings and writings that scrutinizes his own engagement with the Bloomsbury Group within the context of COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter. More information about his work can be found at ArcAble.com. He's also very excited because one of his paintings will be used for the cover of To The Lighthouse, which is fantastic. Congratulations Carbet. So I'm so excited to have conversation with you guys. This is potentially hugely exciting. Virginia Woolf, much loved author, famous for her works, you know, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One's Own. But what would happen if she threw a dinner party and who would make the guest list? I'm going to come to Merve first of your inspired choice of Till the Swinton, which I think is an amazing choice actually. I mean, she of course is known for being a singular actress and unique presence in the art scene, particularly known for films such as Orlando, which she completely, I think, embodied that main protagonist through different time periods. So brilliantly. And of course, we need to talk about Kevin, who could forget that performance. So she is somebody I feel the guest would be drawn to because she is otherworldly. So could you talk us through this brilliant choice, Merve? I will, but I will start maybe by saying that I was struck that I only invited one guest, whereas Elaine, Elaine and Parpe invited multiple guests. So I think maybe that speaks to either my anti-sociality as a host or my sense that Virginia Woolf might have wanted a more intimate kind of party. I chose Till the Swinton for two reasons. One, which you've already mentioned, is her extreme presence and an extreme presence that I think is very interestingly tied to all kinds of ambiguities around gender and around sexuality. And it is, of course, impossible to talk about Virginia Woolf, I think, without bringing up questions of gender and sexuality. Until the Swinton, for me, is someone who really gets at part of Woolf's queerness, part of Woolf's androgyny, and does that in a kind of hyper-aestheticized, very, very, very stylish, but still kind of aloof and reserved way. And when I think of Woolf, that combination of style, reserve, androgyny and queerness is exactly where I place her as a figure and as a writer. So that's one reason. The other reason was that I was thinking a little bit about one of my favorite essays about Mrs. Dalloway's party, which is Alex Zwardling's great essay, Virginia Woolf and the Social System, in which Zwardling makes the argument that the party is, on the one hand, a party, but it's also a kind of wake. And it's a wake for a particular version or a particular moment in the history of the British Empire. And I thought, who do I know or who can I think of that can straddle that boundary between being alive and being dead? And I thought about how Tilda Swinton has also played a vampire, how she has also played a disembodied voice in Derek Jarman's incredible movie, Blue, and how she seems to me in being alive, one of those characters whose presence manages to transcend living. Maybe that's what it means for someone to be iconic. So in terms of who really would capture that sense of the party as both party and wake, I thought about Tilda Swinton. And maybe the last thing that I will say is that any time I read that wonderful passage where the Prime Minister is being described at the party, all rigged up in gold lace and being paraded around the room by Clarissa Dalloway, I think of Tilda Swinton, she is to me the Prime Minister rigged up in gold lace, and then she immediately transitions into a court footman surrounded by rattles and baubles and growing white in old age. And then she immediately transitions into Sally Seton and she just cycles through all of the other characters that are at that party. So that's my that's my offering to use a very Wolfie in term. That's my that's my offering of Tilda Swinton and my reason for it. Thank you so much. That was beautifully put. I think underlining that is that she is transformative, you know, both as a personality and an actress, and she definitely I think would embody somebody that would bring a certain dynamism to that party. And again, has that element of mystery, like you say, there is that quality where you don't quite know her, because she would be able to play so many different characters. So she would bring an amazing dynamic to to that party. Elaine, I think you wanted to chime in please. I just wanted to comment on this, and especially since you've chosen this one character, but obviously you can build on that. I'm wondering what you think of some of the other actresses who have played either Mrs. Dalloway or Virginia Woolf. So what do you think of in their film? Would you invite Vanessa Redgrave? And what about Nicole Kidman and the nose? I have to hear what you think of that. Yeah, well, Vanessa Redgrave certainly, but also who plays the young Clarissa Natasha. I think you'd have to invite both of them. And you'd have to have them wearing the same the same dress and probably the dress that Elizabeth is described as wearing at the party a little bit later on. I think, you know, yes, you would invite that whole trio from the hours, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. But I think you'd have to you'd have to encourage Nicole Kidman to leave the nose at home. Well, that's very key. What would happen to the nose? Absolutely. Yeah. The nose would maybe be a nice centerpiece, a punch bowl around the nose. But no, that prosthetic never quite worked for me. There seemed to be a level of artificiality to it that was impossible to overlook. That's a great question, though. That's a wonderful question. That's a lovely question. And all amazing actresses actually. Can you imagine them all at the party? But yeah, I think that the nose would have to have its own allocated seating, I think, by the sounds of things. Elaine, I want to come to you next for your first two suggested guests which are Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, both incredibly accomplished women in their own rights, both journalists and novelists, but also friends. And I love this idea of this duo who could potentially perhaps cause some disruption at the party. We know that Winifred, for example, wrote the first critique of Virginia Woolf. So she wasn't afraid to get on Woolf's bad sides. So I just wondered if you could talk us through those choices because they're both fascinating. Thanks. Well, you know, I really wanted, when I thought about the party list, my mind immediately went, and this probably says something about me, to people who would be unwelcome guests, people who Virginia Woolf would probably never have thought of inviting. And, you know, at Mrs. Dalloway's party, there's Ellie Henderson who feels she was invited at the last minute and she was. But that's as close as it gets to a really unwanted guest. And Winifred Holtby and Vera Britton, who were friends and formed a kind of almost iconic feminist friendship that lasted until Winifred's death in 1935, they lived together. Although Vera Britton was married and had two children, and it was not a menage act, much more complicated than that. But the interesting thing about them is that when Vera Britton and Winifred Holtby first met at Oxford, Summerfield College, Oxford, right after the war, they had plans to come to London, which they did, and begin their lives as writers, as journalists, as intellectuals, as young working women in London. And all the time that they did from the very beginning until the peak of their career, certainly when Winifred died, they were painfully aware that they did not belong to Bloomsbury. The first place they lived was actually sort of marginally in Bloomsbury. But they were, you know, physically, but they were not of Bloomsbury. And they were quite bitterly aware of Wolf and Bloomsbury and the whole crowd and the gay and parties they might be having to which, you know, Vera and Winifred would never be invited. It was partly a thing about class. They were both upper middle class Americans would say. But Bloomsbury was its own kind of, you know, aristocracy and had its own lineage and genealogy. And they were very bitter about that because they had to make their own way. They were trying to network in literary London, in journalistic London. And in the beginning, to me, it's very touching, you know, how they, how they grasped what we would call, you know, fifth level celebrities or fifth level. And they were so thrilled to have that kind of connection. But obviously, Bloomsbury, when Winifred, hopefully this, this is the book that she wrote about Virginia Wolf and fairly substantial. And it's really good. This came out in 1933. Virginia Wolf, a very different kind of writer from Winifred, hopefully, who was basically a realist, but hopefully really got it about Wolf. She understood about her feminism. She understood about her techniques. She is totally on Wolf's side. It's really, I think it stands up really well, very, very good critical book. And so, in a way, that was her ticket to Virginia Wolf, which she did three times. She interviewed her three times. Most of the time, she didn't get to meet her. And she relied on Ethel. She had an, they had an intermediary, and she got information from her. They had a little bit of correspondence. And when the biography came out, Wolf actually quite liked it. She was really impressed. She had not expected that she was going to be impressed, but she was. And she said, you know, I thought it was so impressive that, you know, maybe I should write about this Virginia Wolf, Wolf said, you know, Justinly. On the other hand, Wolf was incredibly nasty in her letters about Winifred, hopefully herself. And she said, it's really quite dreadful. She said, Holti, of course, is an amiable donkey. And she made a kind of really cruel remark about how Holti had learned to read in the pigsties at her father's farm. Holti grew up in Yorkshire. Her father was a very prosperous farmer. I mean, there's nothing that justifies this kind of nasty remark. So I kind of liked the idea that Winifred would be there. And she and Vera Britton were, actually, they had so much in common with Virginia Wolf. They were feminists. They were socialists. They were pacifists. I mean, there's nothing that didn't mesh, but it would have been kind of jarring to have them there. And Vera Britton herself, Winifred too, they both cared a lot about fashion. They would have worried for days about what to wear to the party. So I think it would be kind of a great juxtaposition. I love that. I consider them, you know, two literary disruptors at this party who were probably unexpected in that environment. But I also love that they had this really amazing friendship so they could rely on each other through difficult times. And like you said, it sounds like there was a real admiration of Wolf, you know, on both their parts. It's just a shame that class was a factor in the way she regarded them. But you know, there is this fascinating element to Wolf that there's this dichotomy where, you know, she could be incredibly gracious, but also quite mean spirited as well. So I can imagine some quite pointed, pithy remarks at that dinner table conversation. But lovely suggestions. Carpe, I want to come to you, bring you in. This amazing suggestion of Toni Morrison as a guest. Incredible writer, obviously. You know, exceptional work capturing the Black American experience in such an expansive, virtuosic way and unapologetic way as well. Jazz is a book that changed my life. So I'm all for this choice. And I'd love to hear more about your decision to have her as a guest. Yeah, I had something I would like to ask Elaine, first of all, if that's okay, just in terms of the very Britain suggestion. It's just because I read Wolf's kind of quite short critique or response of Testament of Youth. And I was quite, yeah, I was quite interested about the kind of the angle and the phrasing that she took on it. She took me to kind of positive movies. She said that she was jealous about it. Something that I've always kind of had in the background thinking about Jacob's room is this question of it being an allergy for Toby. But in actual fact, we know that if he would have survived, there's a good chance that he wouldn't have gone to war. And I kind of just, I like the idea of you inviting very Britain and potentially there being attention there. Wolf may be getting a bit chippy, you know, she may be have a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the idea that they're very Britain. This is someone who, you know, in terms of her pacifism has actually, she's been on the front line, effectively, she's actually gone. She's, you know, she's been, as she says, like having her hand in, you know, people's bodies and stuff. Whereas Wolf's is much, you know, three guineas, it's a much more kind of distanced academic text, sort of academic, but you know, it's incredibly, it's an incredible work of pacifism, but it differs from Testaments of Youth in that way. So I, yeah, I was very intrigued to whether you think that there might be a kind of like attention there for most point of view. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to say, I mean, of course, well, Winifred Holt, he had also been a nurse during the war, but she was in a very different part of France than their Britain, where Britain was really in the trenches, and the front and saw a terrible suffering, terrible wounds. But she was there. And Testaments of Youth is not the only, but certainly the most powerful and notable memoir World War One written by a woman and tremendously impressive. And it has a presence. Of course, Wolf, inconceivable, you cannot imagine, Virginia Wolf being on the front in any way, being in a trench in any way. Although she certainly experienced the war emotionally and did lose relatives in the war very painfully. The other thing about both Vera and Winifred, of course, is that they had gone to Oxford, something that Wolf never was able to do. And then I think she always certainly in a room of one's own, I mean, always feeling was excluded from and imagines what it might have been like. They were actually there at Somerville College, which was the center of literary feminism for a long time at Oxford. So in a lot of ways, they represented something that she couldn't share. But I love the sense of the war memory. She was very impressed by it. And she read Testament of Experience, too, which was the book Vera wrote about Winifred after Winifred died. And she said, to her credit, in a way, she said Winifred was a much more important person, and a much more distinguished person than even Vera, her closest friend, would acknowledge. So it fills it all out. Glad you noticed that. Thank you. Yeah. And in terms of Toni Morrison, I think my selection there was much less about the idea of tension so much as, I think, Toni would maybe want to meet Virginia Wolf. I mean, I'm going to be honest, my first instinct was kind of like, how can I get invited to this party? Why didn't you put yourself on the list? I think we all deserve to be on the list, right? Let's just assume that we're all invited, I think, as well. But Morrison did write a chapter of her MA dissertation on Wolf, right? Yeah. Yeah. So this was actually where my kind of thought process came from, because all I wanted to do was, in terms of the time travel option we have here, is specifically pick Toni Morrison as the Howard Professor, so not necessarily later in her life. But what I have, my interest in Wolf in a lot of ways, my research and tests and creatively, has been looking at the times that she appears in history and culture where we don't expect her to be there. And that's particularly, names is a framework through which I look at that. And yeah, I've done some work connecting Wolf with Stokely Carmichael, you know, the several acts activist, Black Panther and such. And my aim there was looking at the idea of Mary Carmichael in River One Zone and then Stokely Carmichael and then seeing if I could build up these connections between Wolf and Carmichael. And one of the things that came up with was that Toni Morrison was one of the figures that connects them, because, as Mervé says, Toni Morrison, you know, she was a Wolf scholar earlier in her career and she taught Stokely Carmichael at Howard. And what's really fascinating to me is that you can read these stories about Carmichael being kind of at the front of the class and being very, you know, the kind of figure he was, he was very like, you know, he would interrupt and he would make these claims and say, why are we studying this? There's an amazing story I read about Toni Morrison had set a fault in a number of them to read. And Carmichael said, why are we reading this racist old white man when we should be talking about colonialism? And you know, she kind of shuts him down. So I feel quite sure that at some point Toni Morrison would have taught a Room One Zone or some other wolf text to Stokely Carmichael. So I have this idea that I'd like to write maybe a short story about the idea of that class. He reads a Room One Zone and he sees the name Mary Carmichael. Much later in his life, we know that he changed his name and he changed his name to Kwame Ture, you know, in terms of African heritage, his inspiration of African leaders. So he's rejecting, you know, he's rejecting Stokely Carmichael and also his middle name is Winston, sorry, no, it's Churchill, one of his middle names is Churchill. So he's rejecting this, you know, as his slave name. I'm wondering whether Carmichael in Room One Zone would have been one of the first times he sees that name. So in this lesson, if we imagine Wolf's telling this and he's saying, we say, you know, who is this Carmichael? Why are we supposed to, you know, or is this to associate or, or kind of think positively about this Mary Carmichael? Like what were her cousins doing? Her cousins were probably, you know, the, my slave ancestors. And I think Toni Morrison will actually Stokely, I've just had this very interesting invitation to a party that Virginia Wolf is throwing back in time. Why don't you come along? I'll introduce you. I'd like to meet her and then we can see what kind of conversation gets going there. So this was, this was sort of my, my, my thinking that I think Toni Morrison would really like to talk to Wolf. I think, you know, she has a particular interest in Mrs. Dalloway's party. She writes about that in her thesis. And then she would say on, you know, here's my, here's my, one of my brightest students and he's got some questions for you. So another, another point of maybe a developing friendship, but also possibly some tension in the party, I guess. Lovely. I love that. I love that. I mean, the combination of Toni and Stokely together at this party would be the very, very interesting. I think, and I think you're right. I think there would be a real curiosity from, certainly from Toni's part, because she was a real intellectual, as we know, not just a great writer, but an exceptional thinker. So that, that combination could, I think, potentially be quite fiery, having seen Toni in interviews. I think there could be some interesting tension there, but I mean, it's, it's a dream, dreamy list to have both her and Stokely involved. And of course, Stokely heavily participated in advocating Black Rights in America and did that, I think transformative trip of going outside of the U.S. to talk to leaders outside, you know, revolutionally leaders to kind of pick their brains and find out about, you know, their frameworks and how they see the world and, you know, how they want to empower perhaps people who are disenfranchised. So, I mean, fascinating to have him there as a guest. Merve, you wanted to chime in, please do. Well, the way that Carve is thinking made me, made me think of a book whose manuscript I just read by the wonderful Wolf scholar, Elizabeth Abel. It's called Odd Affinities, and it traces Wolf's influence on African American writers. And the two that come to mind that would also make very good party guests are Nella Larson, who's passing Elizabeth Abel reads as a kind of rewriting of Mrs. Dalloway. And a fascinating reading in part because there are lines from Mrs. Dalloway that Larson is taking almost verbatim. So I think it would be interesting to invite someone who walks that line between Acolyte or someone who is influenced and a kind of quasi plagiarist to Virginia Wolf party. And then the other person that Elizabeth reads as having this kind of odd affinity with Wolf is James Baldwin. And she reads Giovanni's room as a kind of rewriting of Jacob's room. And I think to add Nella Larson and Baldwin to this mix of people who have the kinds of odd affinities with Wolf that you're describing Carve would also make for a really interesting guest list. Yeah, that's fantastic. Actually, I was thinking of my own guests that I would love to add to the list. And James Baldwin and Josephine Baker were two people that I would put forward as guests. I mean, James obviously a trailblazer in terms of being a black American gay activist and writer who left the States having been frustrated with the way black Americans were being treated to live in France and that whole experience of spending time away from the US as a black man, but still being connected to what was happening and still being personally very affected by it. And also just an astonishing thinker again. So I know that he's somebody who would be critical, I think, and perhaps cause some tension as well. But there would be a real interest in Wolf and a real curiosity. And Josephine Baker, I think, is just, you know, this is a woman who had several lives, not only an actress, a performer, an activist, but a wonderful humanitarian and also at one point an intelligence officer for the French. So I think as a guest, that's a fascinating element to have in the mix and could potentially be, again, you know, quite, quite exciting to have all these wonderful, eclectic characters in conversation. Elaine, you want to chime in? Marefe, did you have something to say? I thought you looked like you were going to say something to say about Toni Morrison. Well, I was actually going to go to a Renaissance comment about Josephine Baker who also appears in Nella Larson's passing. So to have all of these people in the same space would create a very kind of closed circle. But I just wanted to point out how interesting it is that our guest lists are more or less kind of cool modernists, except for yours, Elaine, where you have the realists coming in as like the agitators. And I just, I was thinking of other realists that we might want to toss in to be the, you know, the crowd, the out crowd at the party. The other thing is Toni Morrison was at Princeton when I was at Princeton was a colleague of mine at Princeton. She is a great party giver, I have to say. She would be the life of the party. And she was one of these people, you know, who brought out the party person and everybody else. And while she was at Princeton, she instituted, I think after she won the Nobel Prize and Princeton, you know, wanted to honor in various ways. And what she asked for was to start something that was called the Princeton Atelier in which two artists from very different fields were brought together to collaborate. And that went on for a number of years, very interesting pairings that she had together. So I think the first one she actually was herself, somebody picked her and she had her poems set to music and performed by Andre Previn. Try to imagine this. So it was, it was an interesting thing. And she would be, she'd be great. I think she would be a wonderful presence at anybody's party. Yeah, there are, there are photos of Toni Morrison at parties, I think. And she's having a really good time. So she seems to somebody who would probably be the life of the party, I reckon. It's a wonderful, wonderful choice. Elaine, I want to come back to you, your second choice of Noel Coward as a guest. I mean, this is a polymath whose wit and flamboyance would be a massive, massive draw. So talk us through Noel as your second choice. Yeah, I really, you know, I don't even have that much to say about Noel Coward. I put him in because he was at the center of a sort of very different, I don't know, gay culture. Again, I thought he was a kind of, I don't know, the entertainment world, something that Wolf doesn't engage with. One of her, one of her blind spots, so to speak, you don't get that sense of her being there. And I was also, I kind of link him with Rebecca West, very different kind of personality, but also as somebody kind of with some of, with a lot of things in common with Wolf, but also kind of an outrageous person, Rebecca West. And as with Winterford Holtry, Wolf was not at all impressed by Rebecca West and wrote an incredibly nasty thing about her too. She said about, about Rebecca West as tenacious, as a terrier with flashing eyes, very shabby, dirty nails, and it goes on. I mean, Wolf, in a way, you think you don't really want to be around that much if you get into the letters. But I think that Rebecca West could have stood up for herself. That's the thing. You don't have to be protective of Rebecca West. And by the time Wolf was writing, way before Wolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, Rebecca West had published one of the first novels about the war in 1918 and was sort of a bit ahead of the game. So she too had written about the effect of war and shell shock on male identity. There are so many, so many potential pairings, right? So many conversations you can imagine that Wolf might not have sought out. Yeah. Do you think, Elaine, just do you think that there was perhaps a competitive element there with Wolf and people she was mean towards other women that she was mean towards? Because, you know, I'm imagining at that time that there probably weren't many women writers being published. And you would, you would hope that there would be some sort of shared affinity there, some sort of sense of community. So I wondered if it was a way of her kind of keeping people who may be a threat in their place, because we know that she has this side to her where she can be gracious, but also quite vicious. Well, it is really interesting. Of course, Vita Sackville West, you know, the great example who obviously would have been at any party. And, you know, if there were such a thing, she would have been there. But there's a fairly small list of people who were accepted into the canon of women writers. And I'm sure they're competitive. I don't know if Wolf thought of it as being competitive. They thought of it as being competitive for sure. Yeah, well, she thought of it. I mean, you could you could put together a great guest list based on just people she said nasty things about in her overflow. I'm thinking like if you really wanted to wrinkle her Catherine Mansfield, with the feel quite competitive, Elizabeth Bowman, there's a great line that she has about Mary Butz, who comes to visit her and she says Mary Butz has left but the stench of her remains. She had written an instant book about the Greeks and the Downs. And so I was just thinking how wonderful it would be for this entire guest list to just be people who would really piss her off. Yeah, yeah. It might be nice to have half the guest list. I think she would need some mediating perhaps some reasonable folk amongst the instigators. But certainly it's fascinating to hear about Mansfield as well. I mean, that was quite a difficult relationship, Mervey. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Well, and she, am I remembering correctly, didn't Mansfield die right as she was writing Mrs. Dalloway? I don't know. I have this annotated version of Dalloway and I'm looking up and taking it. Yes, no, that was an extremely difficult relationship. And that was one that I think was more overtly marked by competition, because she felt that Mansfield got better reviews and that her stories were more widely read. And she felt quite bad about that. And in fact, I think was composing the final chapters or the final interludes of Mrs. Dalloway after Mansfield died. And that seems to me, in addition to Kitty, Max, the inspiration for Clarissa Dalloway, one of the ghosts that's clearly haunting the novel. And that seems to be overhanging the wake or the party at the end of it. But I think that I, yeah, I don't know. I'm coming over more to Elaine's point of view that you want to invite people who either wouldn't have wanted to be there or wouldn't have been wanted. And that that is in many ways the key to a party that people will then talk about. Because people want drama. You don't want some quiet tea party. You want things thrown. You want fights. Absolutely. Yeah, you want tension. You want tension. You want gossip and you want entertainment, I think you want a mixture of all of those things. As well as our wonderful guests, I was thinking about menu as well, potentially. I personally would love some sort of seafood, strange seafood delicacy on the menu, because I think that might be a good topic of conversation. So I was wondering, you know, if we could imagine what the menu would look like, what one thing would each of you want to see on the menu? I'm going to come to you first, Merve. Oh, gosh. I was just thinking about what actually is on the menu or what we're told is on the menu. And the thing that I keep coming back to is the Tokai, the Hungarian Tokai, the wine that we're told that Richard goes and fetches from the wine seller as an emblem of the of his imperial connections. But then I thought maybe I would just read from the end from the beginning of the party scene, I about the Prime Minister coming, and then it made no difference that this hour of the night to Mrs Walker among the plates, saucepans, colanders, frying pans, chicken and aspic, ice cream freezers, paired crusts of bread, lemons, soup terrenes, and pudding basins, which however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of her on the kitchen table on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared and still supper had to be laid. And I think that reading that, you know, you're not actually getting the you're not getting the food itself, right? You're getting the aftermath of the food, the waste of the food that's piling up in the in the kitchen, which makes me think that they both would have eaten too much, it would have been this massively decadent meal, and also like supermodels at a party today, they wouldn't have eaten anything at all. And so the menu is for me both both entirely excessive too much and completely non present at the same at the same time, which which I've always found quite interesting that I can't picture the food. Well, I love the idea of a decadent menu. So I'm going to let that thrive in my imagination. Elaine, you were going to add something. I have a lot of trouble visualizing the party because it sounds you know the scene with the cook, which Mervage has read, it sounds like it's a sit down dinner. But it's described as a stand up like a cocktail party. And I'm trying to imagine them balancing this stuff. And, you know, is how hard it is at a real party to try to do that and juggle it. But the only dish that I can imagine having this because what I would like to have at a party in London in June is my favorite thing to eat in London in June. And I thought it fits with Mrs. Dalloway is eaten mess. There's a lot of, you know, discussion of eating various points. And Sally Seton has these five great sons. And I think some of them, maybe all of them are really eaten. So I thought it would be appropriate. And it's the right season. So eaten mess all over the place. That's a lovely suggestion, Elaine. Classic English bear. Thank you for that. Carl Bay, anything you would add to the menu? Well, I was just thinking, what's funny in terms of eating mess is obviously this whole conversation about a party with the Prime Minister is that at the moment there's this whole discussion in the UK of a party in front of us. So which I would have sort of followed through, I would imagine there's a lot of drink there as as Mervie says, but not so much in terms of what's actually on the plates, but the plates themselves, I just keep thinking about the Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's dinner plate collection. And just whether whether or not the differences we'll see between Mrs. Dalloway's party and Wolf's party are actually kind of like interior stylistic. And it's kind of very important for them to not have these kind of like overly overly ornate plates. But actually, yeah, there's an artistry. And essentially, it's a cool party, which brings me back to Tilda Swinton, I think there is, as you were saying before, there is a very, there's a stylistic sense of what has to be what has to be going on here, which seemingly, Wolf was was, you know, distracted by concerns with, but that's what her, you know, that's what her, her scene, that's what I have seen was these were people who wanted to be, you know, they wanted to be seen as as the cool, you know, the cool ones. This is, this is, this is what's, this is what's quite important to them. Which I think, yeah, just it throws up very, very clear distinctions between at least how I view Mrs. Dalloway's party. And I think potentially, is Wolf's party going to be kind of a younger crown? We, we like to be fair and intergenerational. I mean, I imagine it'd be quite a cool party and one that everybody would want an invite to. So, I mean, you could potentially have quite a young crowd, but in terms of who she moved around with, perhaps slightly older as well, I think it'd be nice to have a good, a good mixture of both. But already it's like a scintillating, scintillating party and guest list. Lastly, I want to just talk briefly about Virginia Wolf's influence. She's a writer who continues to loom largely in our imaginations and, you know, continues to inspire future generations. So I wondered if each of you could just touch on how she's inspired your work and your creativity. I'm going to come to Carbet first this time. Yeah, I mean, my work with Wolf originally started about sort of, I don't know, like 12 years ago now. I was quite a lot younger. And I didn't think that I would come back to it. But in the last couple of years, I've kind of come back to it in quite a big way. She kind of looms ever present. But as I say, I think it's something that I'm so inspired by and interested in is actually this question of influence and how she influences generations afterwards. And not necessarily, I mean, we're actually not even necessarily just in just in literature. There was something I wanted to bring up at the party. I don't know who who would maybe raise this potentially. It could be Till the Swinton again might be, might be a good suggestion point. But I, in terms of the connections between Carmichael and Wolf, I discovered that if anyone can picture the character Susie Carmichael in the Rugrats, she's actually, it turns out named after Stokely Carmichael, and another Nickelodeon cartoon Doug, if anyone ever remembers Doug, and Doug's older sister, Judy is actually named after Judith Shakespeare. So, you know, there was a sense that there were so many different ways that we can like take these threads through through time and it doesn't have to be sort of uniquely connected to the, to the, you know, a modernist writer doesn't have to inspire a modernist writer. And so certainly from my point of view, it's this idea that the differences between me and Virginia Woolf, the fact that she can inspire me despite those, I think is is is very important to me. And that's something that I'm just very interested in seeing how that connects to other people and their work and the way she she is a presence there. Wonderful. Elaine, I'm going to come to you next. Well, I first read Wolf when I was an undergraduate in a course taught by a particularly conservative and unimaginative professor. And we read Mrs. Dalloway and she said that it was about learning to be a healthier husband, which I think is not an interpretation that any of us would apply now. But one of the things that was always important to me was the sense of how Anglo American in a sense Wolf was. And this is Dalloway certainly, because of course, there are manuscripts both in the United States and in the UK. And research that I did, I've done research and looked at the manuscripts in the Bird Collection of the New York Public Library, which was when I when I first looked at was really a shrine. Everybody, you know, all the feminist scholars wanted to read Wolf. And all of us went in there in this hushed, sanctuary, being very careful not to touch anything. Because if we did, you know, the very stern head of the Bird Collection would come in and yell at us and scold us. And then reading the manuscripts in the British Library, which are magnificent and bowed and you can turn off the pages, very luxurious. And the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, there were two different editions, the American and the British. So I have a kind of identification with that as an American who also feels very angle a lot of the time. Hopefully, Mervay, I'm going to come to you. Yeah, maybe I'll actually flip what Elaine said, which is as an American who lives in the UK and who finds a great deal of it baffling, very, very strange. The process of annotating Mrs. Dalloway was actually extremely educational for me. It was an incredible education and understanding things about the history of the UK, but also the particular role that the institution where I work, Oxford has played in the imagination of many people in the UK and the role that it played in Wolf's imagination. And it helped me understand both what I find puzzling or inscrutable and what I feel a kind of deep antipathy to, which are these continuing legacies of its role in propping up colonial administration. And I continue to find Mrs. Dalloway extraordinary for the way that imperialism is written into the details of that novel, that part of what I learned annotating it was that every statue that you see, that you read the name of as Peter Walsh is walking down the street, or every person who is named at the party has some kind of a pernicious tie to the state and its projects of colonialism and genocide in many cases. And so I think, again, just to play off of what Elaine was saying, and that kind of fascinatingly horrible interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway as being a novel about being your husband's helpmate, I think one of Wolf's legacies that we can recover is her extraordinary political imagination and her capacity for political satire and particularly satire and critique of the colonial project, traces of which are still here, are still present today, whether that's in the form of statues or institutions of higher education. Is that too, is that too polemical? Did I end up? No, no, it's, it's wonderful, though. Elaine, were you going to respond? Was anyone going to respond or? I was just sort of thinking, you know, that one of the things that I really love reading Marabay's annotating Mrs. Dalloway, which is so thorough and I mean, but there are things that that you pick up that I would have passed over because I thought, well, everybody knows this, you don't have to annotate it, but you have to annotate everything. And there's an entry for the Bodleian Library very early on. And I can't remember that that was in Mrs. Dalloway, but it is. It's just mentioned in passing. And when you talk about it, he said the second largest library and all kinds of information about it. So I do think that, you know, there's a way that you can unpack or locate, you can you can be attentive to so many of these references, which could simply be like the air, maybe to a native. Fascinating stuff. Just to add to that, I was, I think what's really interesting about this this party setup in terms of what you said, Marabay, is that kind of as Wolf Scholars, you have this interesting, this dual recognition of Wolf as a person and then as her writer in terms of her work. And yeah, I find it so funny and kind of fun that we're so much of what we've been talking about is how she would respond to people and the kind of like strange ways, you know, people who you would think of as like, yeah, contemporaries that she, I don't know, on the face of it, you know, she's referencing the work, she's positive about the work, but she's very scathing about them as people. Which, yeah, I've always found like quite something that really draws me to her as a writer, that there is that like, that strange tension there. But it's when it's when you actually really, which as I did with the poem, as you see, is you really, really get into the text and you, you kind of kind of appreciate her as a writer. And as I think her in a way, that means you often will then have to leave behind all the, you know, the kind of things about her that may be interest us more as, as like, you know, particular Wolf scholars or people into, into her in that way. And yeah, and I just, yeah, I just totally agree with what you were saying about the, the, the interest in where the colonialism features in Mrs. Dalloway and the way you can read that in the text. Thank you all for your wonderful contributions. Unfortunately, we've run out of time. I mean, I could mine your brains endlessly about this intriguing prospect of a dinner party with Virginia Woolf. It's absolutely amazing. Thank you, everyone. It's been a joy to talk to you and hear your insights about this potential dinner party. Dalloway Day is a fantastic day that we love to celebrate at the RSL. Please join us again next year, where we will be doing the same thing, reimagining how we celebrate Virginia Woolf in interesting and fascinating ways, a writer that continues to be at the forefront of the site, guys. Thank you so much for joining us and see you next year. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye.