Reading “Mrs. Dalloway” with the 1918 influenza pandemic in mind puts Clarissa’s pleasure in traversing the city in a new light.
“Mrs. Dalloway” is set in 1923, five years on from the global influenza pandemic that killed somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. Clarissa Dalloway is one of the survivors. On the book’s second page, in the first of many perspective shifts, a neighbor of Clarissa’s watches her and observes that she has “grown very white since her illness”; in the next paragraph, we learn that her heart had been “affected . . . by influenza.
Woolf understood as well as anyone the long-term effects that viruses could wreak on bodies, and on societies. But she also understood that not everyone was able to speak of it, or wanted to hear about it. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza,” Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.”
The 1918 pandemic left far fewer traces on literature and culture than might have been expected for an event that, by some calculations, killed more than five per cent of the world’s population. This is in part because it took place in 1918 and early 1919, just as the First World War was winding down, and it has been accordingly overshadowed. “The millions of flu deaths didn’t count as history in the ways the war casualties did,” Outka writes.
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