Truth and Falsity of Life-Writing

On March 9, 2000, during an evening celebrating the legacy of Virginia Woolf by the PEN American centre, Michael Cunningham was asked to talk about his relationship with Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway. He was undeniably the star of the evening held at Manhattan Town Hall, (despite the presence of other significant literary figures, such as Susan Sontag and Elaine Showalter) hailed (by some) as the one who brilliantly succeeded in resurrecting Woolf and bringing her to the wide audience by means of his, by that time, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize Winning novel The Hours. He spoke about his initial encounter with Woolf ‘s fiction when, as a fifteen-year-old, he first got a grip on Mrs. Dalloway and was struck by ‘the depth, intensity, complexity and the music of those sentences.’ He considered Mrs. Dalloway to be the first book that connected with him and showed him what literature could be like: ‘This first book stayed with me. I felt wedded to it. I felt about it what I had never felt about any other book.’

A couple of years later, in an email to the literary critic and biographer Hermione Lee, Cunningham made a different comment about Virginia Woolf: “I know of no other figure who inspires such ferocious possessiveness.’ This opinion was formulated as a result of violent attacks launched on both his novel and, in particular, its movie adaptation (The Hours, 2003, written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry) by many Woolfians all over the world.