Image: Clarke, Harry. “The dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet.” The Masque of the Red Death, 1919. Wikipedia.org. The dark climax of the book comes on the heels of one of its happiest reversals. Septimus, the ex-soldier struggling with “shell shock,” wakes up from a world of delusions for a golden minute of normalcy with his …

Image: Godward, John William. The Jewel Casket. 1900. WikiArt.org. Clarissa, Mrs. Richard Dalloway, is not like other heroes from classical Greece. For starters, she’s not Greek but English, and she lives in 1923. Still, her life follows a common pattern of that tradition. The first scene opens in medias res, dumping us on the street …