‘More relevant now than ever’: how Virginia Woolf recaptured the cultural zeitgeist

With an adaptation of Night and Day hitting cinemas, the pioneering author’s work continues to inspire audiences

She’s long been admired by students of English literature, but 85 years after her death, Virginia Woolf has broken out of the seminar room to become an unexpected cultural phenomenon.

The author of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, whose innovative prose helped redefine the modern novel, is finding a new audience through a string of high-profile adaptations.

This Friday sees the release of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day in cinemas, an adaptation of Woolf’s novel of the same name. The romcom, starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall and Lily Allen, is about a female astronomer whose carefully ordered life is disrupted when she becomes entangled in a love triangle – forcing her to confront romantic desire and the patriarchal expectations of Edwardian society. Clarissa – a modern-day reimagining of Mrs Dalloway set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria – became the talk of Cannes last month.

“I’ve long been a huge fan of Virginia Woolf,” said Night and Day’s director, Tina Gharavi. “She was an iconic lesbian author who wrote about intimate personal experience. I thought she was extraordinary in the way she carried herself in a world that diminished women’s stories and voices.”

Gharavi, the British-Iranian film-maker behind the Bafta-nominated I Am Nasrine, said she was initially in discussions for 2018’s Vita & Virginia, the biographical romantic drama about Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West which inspired Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. In Night and Day, she and screenwriter Justine Waddell have expanded Woolf’s single reference to astronomy into the emotional centre of the film.

“I wasn’t familiar with Night and Day, but when I read it I immediately connected with Katharine Hilbery’s story, her ambition and fear of love, because at that time it often led to children and domestic servitude. She wanted to avoid that, and I understood that,” Gharavi said.

“I was also curious about why Virginia was writing this book. There was something beautiful about this woman who wants to be an astrophysicist, just looking at the sky. I loved the metaphor of a woman looking at the heavens as a perspective on existence – how silly it is to reduce women to lesser roles, with all these social mores and barriers to fulfilment.”

Gharavi said it felt serendipitous to make this film while “living with the consequences of the Iranian war”. While Woolf wrote Night and Day in 1919, she set it in 1910, at the cusp of global conflict.

“There must have been a reason she chose that moment,” Gharavi said. “Most of the men, like Ralph Denham, would have gone to war and died.

“Woolf also wrote this book when she was in a mental institution, but it is actually a romcom – it’s whip smart and funny. That’s what’s so great about comedy, and why we need a film like this. We need to be able to stand how difficult it is to live right now – with war, with genocide. We need to be reminded of our better selves and what connects us all is laughter.”

Clarissa, which stars Sophie Okonedo alongside David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, follows a high-society woman preparing to host a party in Lagos, where she unexpectedly encounters figures from her past.

Directed by brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the film is expected to be widely screened on the autumn festival circuit. Chuko Esiri first read Woolf’s novel as a teenager at a British boarding school. “I didn’t understand it, but I felt it,” he told the New York Times. Over time, he began to see “pieces of everybody I knew cached in these characters”.

He said present-day Nigeria and 1920s England were “eerily similar … specifically how conservative the cultures are”. The brothers have even named a writing desk Virginia. “[Chuko] literally does say things like, ‘I’ve got a meeting with Virginia’,” Arie Esiri said.

Woolf’s work has long proved ripe for adaptation because of its intensely internal nature – its focus on consciousness, voiceover and monologue. That quality underpinned Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), which interwove the lives of three women connected by Mrs Dalloway. Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), starring Tilda Swinton, offered a more radical interpretation of Woolf’s spirit, transforming her novel into a playful, gender-fluid meditation on identity and time.

This spring, a stage adaptation of The Waves at London’s Jermyn Street theatre was a critical hit, while a touring production of Mrs Dalloway, featuring Kit Green playing 16 roles, has also drawn attention.

Beyond the stage and screen, Woolf’s presence has also seeped into more diffuse corners of contemporary culture, particularly among younger audiences, who circulate quotes from Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own on social media.

In a further sign of that cultural afterlife, this autumn the West End in London hosts a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup. While not based on any of Woolf’s texts, the title reflects the way her name has become shorthand for a kind of intellectual, emotionally volatile interior drama.

“She invented a type of novel that centred female lives, we owe a debt of gratitude to her,” said Gharavi, who also teaches at Newcastle University. “Woolf was a modernist and I think we should be modernists in how we make adaptations relevant today. What would Virginia think and do today? I’m sure she would say: make it more radical. That’s why we have black, queer, trans characters in our story.”

Gharavi said audiences needed to “find their own relationship” with Woolf. “We still don’t have women’s voices equal to men’s, even today, 100 years after she wrote this book. That’s insane. There must be a reason she’s in the zeitgeist. She’s more relevant now than ever.”