Her wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age. In the September issue of The Atlantic, you’ll find an insightful piece on how this well-regarded book from one hundred years ago is giving us a new perspective on the crises that women face in their 40s.
While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf pondered, “My theory is that at 40 one either increases the pace or slows down. Needless to say which I desire.” In The Atlantic piece, there’s some great writing about midlife including:
“The defining feature of midlife is its formlessness. It takes the shape of what it is not—not youth, not old age. (Is 40 old or young? How about 50?) Yet it’s a phase of massive transformation: for some an interlude of welcome stability in which they can take stock, for others a time to take new risks. It doesn’t want for literary examples—the work of recent fiction writers including Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, and Miranda July, for example, revolves around women reflecting on their choices midway through life. In content, if not in style, they all owe something to Mrs. Dalloway.”
As is true for so many of us, middle age is a seesaw of regret, both of what we wish we’d done and what we wish he hadn’t done (with the former being more painful). The nagging midlife “what if” questions can mess with one’s serenity. For so many of us midlife can mean mediocrity, settling for circumstances that we never would have accepted in our early adulthood. But, as The Atlantic’s writer says of Woolf’s protagonist, “The core of the novel is Clarissa’s realization that life is happening in the present tense, and so that is where she ought to be.”
There’s something about reading a classic book at our age that was originally assigned to us in high school or college when we had so little life experience. I know I’ve found books like “Man’s Search for Meaning” and “The Divine Comedy” to feel so much more relevant at this age than they were when I was preoccupied with popping pimples and boners (OMG, did I really write that?). As we enter the dog days of summer (both in 2026 and in our life), maybe it’s worth cracking open a classic and taking it for a whirl of a read?
-Chip