The Inspiration for Daughter Dalloway

The Inspiration for Daughter Dalloway

By Emily France

In 2018, I came across an article about Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I had not read the book since college, so I picked it up again. As I read, I noticed a character I had never seen before: Mrs. Dalloway’s only child, Elizabeth. She plays the briefest of parts in the original; we see barely a snapshot of her at age seventeen. I caught a very brief line about her: she had watched her mother nearly die in the 1918 flu pandemic.

It had damaged her mother’s heart; Woolf writes that Clarissa had grown very pale since then. I quickly did the math: Elizabeth would have been twelve years old. I already knew a lot about the 1918 pandemic; it killed my great-grandmother and left my grandmother an orphan. The flu pandemic was an important part of our family history, and we discussed it often as I was growing up. I did some research and found pictures of children in masks. I was horrified. Children in masks? I couldn’t imagine putting my own child in a mask in hopes that he would survive. I was riveted; I so badly wanted to write the story of a woman who’d been a pandemic child. How had it shaped her? I began the book.

And that was in 2018. 

Little did I know that in just two short years, the world would be gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Little did I know I’d be putting a mask on my own young child. Little did I know I’d be terrified that our family pandemic history was repeating itself. 

As I wrote, I fretted about my son constantly. His preschool closed, the playgrounds closed, he saw no other children.  People were suffering and dying all over the world. I would look at my son and ache for him—what a tragic time to be a child. What a world he had entered.

Then the strangest thing happened. As I created Elizabeth’s character and researched what her life would have been like—I found comfort. What should have been a difficult dive into the history of another child traumatized by a pandemic, turned out to be a gift.

Elizabeth Dalloway would have been born in 1906. The first major event in her childhood was not a pandemic—it was a world war. WWI began in 1914 when she was only eight years old. She lived in London, a city that was heavily bombed. Infants died when their school was attacked; her mother would have spent days and nights fearfully watching the skies. 

At the age of twelve, the global flu pandemic was the next world crisis in her childhood. The flu of 1918 was gruesome. For good or ill, the flu killed quickly—a person could be fine at teatime and dead by dinner. It was vicious and swift. One drowned in short order. Perhaps the most horrifying fact was that the flu came after every person, but it particularly preyed on the young. Children. Like Elizabeth. And the young soldiers. Soldiers who had valiantly fought and miraculously survived WWI contracted the flu in droves. What a cruel injustice: to survive at the Front only to come home and die with fluid in your lungs. Again, I thought of the mothers. The ones who watched their young children die. Or the ones who rejoiced when their grown children returned from war—and had to bury them shortly after their reunion. 

When Elizabeth was twenty-three—and perhaps wanting to bring her own child into the world—there was a global economic depression. In Britain, millions were unemployed, starving, and lining up at soup kitchens. There was a crisis of child malnutrition; rates of scurvy, rickets, and tuberculosis soared. Again, I thought of the mothers. The ones who could not feed their babies, let alone themselves. 

Only ten years later, Elizabeth would have lived through a second world war; WWII began when she was thirty-three. Her city was once again devastated by bombs. She would have seen France, a country just across the Channel, fall into enemy hands, wondering if her country was next. Again, I thought of the mothers. 

I continued to write throughout the COVID pandemic with Elizabeth Dalloway as my constant companion. Researching what the life of a woman born in 1906 would have been like was humbling. I was not the first mother to shepherd a child through a global pandemic. In fact, I was lucky I hadn’t just gotten my little boy through a world war. There was not a global economic collapse; there was not another war on the horizon. I realized that people Elizabeth’s age lived with unique worldwide crises their entire lives; by the time WWI, the flu pandemic, and WWII were over, I imagine they didn’t expect it to be any other way. It was I who was the bewildered one, so shocked that a tragedy could destabilize the entire world during my lifetime.

Elizabeth Dalloway was the inspiration for my book, but in the end, she was the inspiration for me as a pandemic mother. She taught me not to despair, not to feel unique, not to feel as though I could not go on. In short, she made me feel less alone. And for that, I will always be grateful.

I believe that writing is a mysterious process, and it is because of inexplicable experiences like this that I keep picking up my pen. Characters arrive in my life in miraculous ways, and I can’t wait to find out what the next one has in store. And Elizabeth, thanks for the visit.

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Emily France is a graduate of Brown University and is the critically acclaimed author of several books. Her young adult titles, Zen and Gone and Signs of You, were selected as a Washington Post Best Book of the Month and an Apple Books Best of the Month. Daughter Dalloway is her adult debut. Learn more at www.EmilyFranceBooks.com.

DAUGHTER DALLOWAY

Perfect for fans of Marie Benedict and Renee Rosen, Daughter Dalloway is both an homage to the Virginia Woolf classic and a brilliant spin-off—the empowering, rebellious coming-of-age story of Mrs. Dalloway’s only child, Elizabeth.

London, 1952: Forty-six-year-old Elizabeth Dalloway feels she has failed at most everything in life, especially living up to her mother, the elegant Mrs. Dalloway, an ideal socialite and model of perfection until she disappeared in the summer of 1923—and hasn’t been heard from since.

When Elizabeth is handed a medal with a mysterious inscription from her mother to a soldier named Septimus Warren Smith, she’s certain it contains a clue from the past. As she sets out, determined to deliver the medal to its rightful owner, Elizabeth begins to piece together memories of that fateful summer.

London, 1923: At seventeen, Elizabeth carouses with the Prince of Wales and sons of American iron barons and decides to join the Bright Young People—a group of bohemians whose antics often land in the tabloids. She is a girl who rebels against the staid social rules of the time, a girl determined to do it all differently than her mother. A girl who doesn’t yet feel like a failure.

That summer, Octavia Smith braves the journey from the countryside to London, determined to track down her older brother Septimus who returned from the war but never came home. She falls in with a group of clever city boys who have learned to survive on the streets. When one starts to steal her heart, she must discover whether he is a friend or foe—and whether she can make it in the city on her own.

Elizabeth and Octavia are destined to cross paths, and when they do, the truths they unearth will shatter their understanding of the people they love most.

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Category: On Writing