May 2025 marked the hundredth anniversary of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, regarded as one of the greatest novels in English of the twentieth century.

Emeritus Fellow Dr Trudi Tate was invited by Oxford University Press to prepare a new edition of the novel for the Oxford World’s Classics series. Books in this series are used all over the world by students, lecturers, and all kinds of general readers. 

Trudi wrote a new introduction to the novel and revised the explanatory footnotes and chronology. ‘It is a great honour to introduce this wonderful novel to new generations of readers’, she said. ‘The cover image is a painting of poppies by Woolf’s friend, Roger Fry, from 1917. Mrs Dalloway is in part a novel about the enduring grief after the First World War. One of the characters, Septimus Smith, is suffering from shell shock. It is also a novel about life and memory; about people connecting, and how we know one another.’

In April, Trudi gave a keynote lecture on Mrs Dalloway at the annual Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain conference at Camden Town Hall in London.