Previously in this series: How To Tell If You Are In A Victor Hugo Novel. You are fifty, a little frail, and the meat of your life is gone. And yet—do you not still feel part of it? Despite your age, despite Oliver’s slights, do you not still feel, even now, that you are a part of the rollicking heart of the city, the flowers in lusty bloom at Charing Cross, the hum…

Previous installments in this series can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road.] Cousin Violet was full of pithy advice in this week’s episode. She deprecates the examined life upon hearing of Lord Gillingham’s period of self-reflection in Scotland (to be fair, it doesn’t seem to have done him any good); then later, at the church bazaar, she tells…

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. She said it -- as she said it every day -- to an empty room, just a little after nine o'clock in the morning, and appeared satisfied with the answer. She spent a moment arranging herself. Shoes had become more difficult since the war -- which war she wasn't quite sure of at the moment, for some reason -- so she finally gave up on putting…

Previously: Virginia Woolf, Beloved Chinese Novelist. "I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It…