No one in the Bloomsbury Group stirs more curiosity for me than Virginia Woolf. Her passion for writing a beacon for me as I navigate my own life putting words on the page. This quote from one of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, illustrates why I felt an echo between the the protagonist Clarissa and another fictive character, Lady Edith in Downton Abbey, even though Edith’s trauma is situationally imposed whereas Clarissa Dalloway’s is self-imposed. The voice-over in the film based upon Woolf’s novel says, “She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

I mention this novel in the context of a post about how Julian Fellowes had Lady Edith declaring she had met Woolf and Lytton Strachey, a brilliant move given the year he was writing about was 1925, the year Woolf penned the novel. Any time I mention Virginia Woolf in posts, they are filed under this tag.