New York Times Book Review features Proust scholar, André Aciman, who trashes “Mrs. Dalloway” and would like to demote Virginia Woolf from the canon

“I would remove Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf [from the literary canon]…Mrs. Dalloway is an overrated novel that I don’t find particularly gripping or interesting. I’m not even sure it’s well written” (1).

However, as a Proust scholar, Aciman focuses on the wrong novel by Woolf. If he understood that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a prototypical multiple personality novel with multiple narrative personalities, he would not have focused primarily on Mrs. Dalloway, which, although it involves multiple personality, does not do so as pervasively as Woolf’s The Waves and Orlando.

Proust and Woolf are both in the literary canon, because they are both outstanding multiple personality novelists.

1. “André Aciman Would Like to Demote Virginia Woolf From the Canon.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/books/review/andre-aciman-by-the-book-interview.html