In-Person

Dalloway Day

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | 10:00am

Jun 11

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

So begins Virginia Woolf’s iconic Modernist novel that follows Clarissa Dalloway, and the various characters who move in and out of her orbit, as she prepares to host a party on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the novel's publication, another otherwise unremarkable day in June will become Dalloway Day at the Library. Beginning at 10 a.m. and with a break for high tea, we'll read the novel in its entirety.

Presented in partnership with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, this event is free and open to the public.

Registration encouraged. Audience members can drop in and out throughout the day.

Why has Mrs. Dalloway endured across a full century? From one perspective, not much happens in the novel. A middle-aged woman shops in London. Mends a dress. Frets about her daughter. Receives visits from an old admirer (or two). Hears news of a stranger’s death. Hosts that party she planned. But from another perspective, everything happens. All of life unfolds in the very place where, for Woolf, life is most real: the mind. By crafting experimental prose that replicates the flow of consciousness, Woolf plunges her readers into a drama of memory and perception. People are more than they seem, the present rests on layers of history, and the past is never really past.

Spending time with this story might help us build our ability to reckon with that past, and to determine the possibilities for our present and potential for our future.

We hope you can join us.