This Week 100 Years Ago: Headlines from 05 13, 2025
Looking Back: Mid-May 1925
Welcome to another edition of This Week 100 Years Ago, where we step into a world lit by gas-lamps, jazz, and a sense that anything—radio, aviation, women’s voices—could change the future overnight. Our time-machine lands us in London on 14 May 1925, just one day after the date we’re commemorating, where a slender volume quietly rewrote modern literature.
London, 14 May 1925 — Mrs Dalloway Hits the Bookshops
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Clarissa Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself—and Virginia Woolf kept the promise for her. On this Thursday morning in 1925, Hogarth Press (run from the Woolfs’ own dining room) released Mrs Dalloway, a novel that dared to cram an entire life, and an entire city, into a single June day. Readers leafed through its stream-of-consciousness pages and discovered bold, breathless sentences that felt more like thought than prose.
Woolf’s London is post-war London: shell-shocked veterans wander Regent’s Park; cars and aeroplanes intrude on polite society; Big Ben ticks louder than ever. The book captures the psychological scars of World War I, but also the exhilaration of modern urban life—buses rumbling, motorcars honking, skirts shortening, possibilities multiplying.
Why It Mattered (Then and Now)
- Narrative Innovation: Woolf jettisoned linear storytelling for interior monologue. That experiment opened doors for countless 20th-century writers—and even today’s 2025 VR storytellers who let users drift inside a character’s head owe her a debt.
- Mental-Health Spotlight: By portraying war veteran Septimus Warren Smith’s trauma with compassion, Woolf slipped a conversation about PTSD into living-room reading circles. In 2025, we discuss mental health openly on social media and telehealth apps, but the groundwork was partly laid by novels like this.
- Women’s Voices: Only seven years had passed since British women achieved (near) equal suffrage. Woolf’s centralizing of female perspective foreshadowed the diverse storytelling explosion visible on today’s streaming platforms.
Quick 2025 Comparison
| 1925 | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Hogarth Press hand-setting type in a dining room | AI-assisted self-publishing platforms releasing to global audiences overnight |
| Limited print run, physical distribution | E-ink, audiobooks narrated by neural voices, and haptic-feedback ‘litpods’ |
| PTSD still unnamed in medical manuals | Dedicated VR therapies and government coverage for trauma treatment |
As you scroll past this post, spare a thought for Clarissa walking through Westminster, hearing Big Ben strike eleven—still telling us, a century later, to seize the day.