A summer walk with Mrs Dalloway

On 13 June at 15:00, we will meet in Lossi 3 to go on a summer walk in Tartu with a heroine of Virginia Woolf's novel.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is one of Virginia Woolf’s most celebrated modernist novels, where the narrator walks the streets of London on a June day with Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and others. Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), maps a modern metropolis but does so from a woman's point of view. To wander and wonder further from Leopold Bloom’s Dublin, stout, and stinky pubs, let’s follow Clarissa through London to her party in Westminster. This way, we can give Dallowday its long due next to Bloomsday, which was also celebrated in Tartu last year.

"Life; London; this moment of June" captures the spirit of Woolf’s novel well, and although we cannot be in London, we have Tartu and June and a summer day on a Wednesday – a day on which Clarissa Dalloway took a stroll in London and bought flowers for the party she hosted in the evening. So get your summer dresses or shorts and good shoes, and let’s meet to celebrate the end of the academic year, life, and "this moment of June" together by reading some extracts of Mrs Dalloway in English and Estonian.

We meet at Lossi 3 to then stroll to the Leeri Lilled flower shop, in front of which we’ll do a reading. We then head to a park for another reading, after which we’ll walk through the city centre, stopping for one more reading. We’ll end at Lossi 3, where we will have a party. The walk will not be longer than 1.5 hrs. After the party, we can head to a bar to enjoy a cocktail or something sparkling.

Register for the reading here.