The Cinema and Its Prey: Modernism in Adaptations of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and "Mrs Dalloway"

Abstract

This thesis aims to find out how modernist elements of Virginia Woolf’s novels Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) have been adapted to film in Sally Potter’s adaptation Orlando (1992) and Marleen Gorris’s and Eileen Atkins’s adaptation Mrs Dalloway (1997). The thesis concludes that while these films were commercially successful they still contain many modernist elements, such as Woolf's stream of consciousness technique and the themes war and technology. Other modernist elements, such as the concept of time, were largely left out of the films, because they were too difficult to adapt or because they would make the film too confusing for a wider audience.