Next appointment with English literature on Saturday 18 May at 6pm at the Dickens Fellowship in Piazza Alberica 2/a Carrara with the conference Portrait of a lady: Clarissa and the others dedicated to the great English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and his masterpiece Mrs Dalloway (1925). The conference will be hosted by Paolo Bugliani who will be introduced by Marzia Dati.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is considered by many to be Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. The novel is set on a warm June day in 1923 when Clarissa Dalloway, beaming socialite Londoner, goes out to buy some flowers and thus complete the preparations for a party that will take place that same evening. Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran haunted by the ghosts of the conflict, will instead end his day with an extreme act: committing suicide due to his traumatic delusions. Although the novel is, in the author’s intention, a diptych that revolves around these two characters, Clarissa is unquestionably the protagonist. Clarissa is also accompanied by a plethora of female characters who, under the aegis of her dazzling presence, each carve out an important textual space for themselves: Evelyn, Lucrezia, Millicent, Elizabeth, Daisy, Doris, and Sally, equally and more so than Septimus, Richard, Peter and Hugh seem to form an angelic choir that accompanies Clarissa and celebrates the prismatic and iridescent nature of early twentieth-century London.
Paolo Bugliani is a researcher in English Literature at the University of Pisa. He taught at the Universities of Padua and Rome “Tor Vergata”. He has been visiting scholar at theOxford Center for Life-Writing from Wolfson College and research fellow at the University of Pisa. He mainly deals with theory and history of life writing (in particular the essay) from the eighteenth century to Romanticism, with forays into the twentieth century. To this primary area are added research on Anglo-Italian and Anglo-French cultural mediation (with particular regard to the diffusion of Dante and Montaigne in England) and on animal symbolism in English and Anglo-American modernist fiction.
More recently he has been engaged in a new translation of Mrs Dalloway for BUR (forthcoming in October), and in a monograph on the Romantic legacies of British modernism (2025-6).
