Loving Bach: shell shock and hysterical fugue

This unobtrusive conversation from the final section of Mrs Dalloway takes place at the party, the event that concludes the day the novel traces. As the enthusiasm of hostess and guest suggests, Bach's fugues – the objects, as Grove puts it, of ‘almost universal esteem’ since at least the early nineteenth century – were enjoying a renewed vogue in the 1920s, partly due to the rise of musical neo-classicism. Allusions to Bach are scattered throughout Woolf's letters and diaries of this period, and she attended several concerts at the Bach Festival in 1920 before starting work on the texts that became this novel; the Woolfs' record collection eventually included eighty recordings of Bach's music.