Recent graduate, Kylie Horan, won the 2024 Angelica Garnett Undergraduate Essay Prize from International Virginia Woolf Society for her essay, "Woolf, Will, and the War Bride: Cymbeline and the Figure of Fascist Italy in Mrs. Dalloway.” This essay was the culmination of her Senior Seminar, Woolf and Her Daughters, taught by the brilliant Dr. Megan Quigley. As an English and Italian major, she sought to combine my foci through examining the sole Italian figure in Woolf’s canon: Rezia, Septimus Warren Smith’s war bride. She spent several months researching, drafting, and conferencing weekly with Dr. Quigley; the help of her wonderful colleagues at the Writing Center was instrumental, as well. The essay, as it will appear in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, is a slightly excerpted form of the edition written for Villanova.
Here is an abstract of the essay: Literary critics have long analyzed Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as a novel invested in issues of war and feminism. However, they have neglected the nexus point of these two matters: Rezia Warren Smith, the Italian war bride of main character Septimus Warren Smith. This essay centers this historically ignored character, arguing that she, as the embodiment of her nation, introduces the contemporary shadow of Italian fascism into the text. It considers Mrs. Dalloway as a precursor to Woolf’s famous anti-fascist, feminist work, Three Guineas, and Rezia an avatar through which Woolf explores the relationship between feminine bodies and feminized nations under violent, masculine domination. It argues that Woolf revises Shakespeare’s Cymbeline— a play about wartime nationhood quoted frequently throughout the novel— for a post-war Europe, with Rezia replacing heroine Imogen, who, too, stands in for her nation. Through an almost-exact replication of Imogen’s arc, down to a final consumption of a sleeping draught, Woolf draws a clear parallel between the two characters, only breaking away in Rezia’s final moments. Where Imogen-as-England wakes from her sedative, returning prosperity to her kingdom and reflecting England’s safety, Rezia-as-Italy merely fades into unconsciousness, seeing only the foreboding shadow of a man and visions of battlefields: a dark premonition of what Italy, freshly under Mussolini’s control, will come to face. Drawing on a unique collection of sources from Woolf’s diaries and London newspapers to Milanese history and Shakespeare criticism, the International Virginia Woolf Society has proclaimed the essay a work of “original insights… a true contribution to Woolf studies that will excite many readers.”
