Mrs. Dalloway as the First Internet Novel

So argues Megan Garber in her "The Great Novel of the Internet Was Published in 1925" in The Atlantic Monthly:

Whose thoughts are readers privy to as we’re thrown into their day? Are they those of Clarissa Dalloway, the hostess? Or are they those of Lucy, her maid? That the answer is both says a lot about why Dalloway, a century after Woolf wrote it, retains its allure. Everyone has a story, Woolf’s method suggests. The question is merely whose will be told and whose will be ignored.

That is also, as it happens, one of the core questions posed by the internet. What will result when people finally—revolutionarily—can be the authors of their own experience? Will the new access we have to one another encourage empathy, or foreclose it? Dalloway, a novel of ironized intimacies, anticipated these stakes. It acknowledges the double valence of two of the key value propositions of life in a digital world: seeing and being seen. “He made her see herself,” Dalloway’s narrator says of Peter’s effect on Clarissa. The reader can decide whether the perspective Peter provides is a gift or a curse.

As much as I adore and have read James Joyce, I wonder if Woolf may not have more to say in style and substance than he does. Could be it is just everyone has been too afraid of Virginia Woolf to give her her due.

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