Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, “had just broken into her fifty-second year.” The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response. But I would put it right alongside that epic, near the very top, because it rewards rereading at various stages of life. As Hillary Kelly wrote this week in The Atlantic, “The novel’s centennial has occasioned a flurry of events and new editions, but not as much consideration of what I would argue is the most enduring and personal theme of the work: It is a masterpiece of midlife crisis.”

First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:

• The tech novel’s warning for a screen-addled age
• The Islamic Republic was never inevitable.
• Memoir of a mailman
• Eight books for dabblers
• “Faith,” a poem by Kevin Young

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway, as many readers do, when I was in college, and it lit up my still-maturing brain. Like Ulysses, it takes place over a single day in June, pulling together a group of narrative perspectives to capture the physical and mental cacophony of modern city life. Its characters include Clarissa, who is about to host a high-society party, as well as Septimus Smith, “aged about thirty,” a veteran of World War I who ends up jumping to his death. The juxtaposition of life and death, war and peace, youthful fury and wistful wisdom, reflects Woolf’s ambition to deploy stream-of-consciousness style in the service of deep emotional realism. One of the first works of literature to depict what would later be known as PTSD, it is in part about the dangerous passions of youth.

And yet its title character is 51, married to a politician, and worried that she has forsaken a more adventurous life. Woolf writes that Clarissa, setting off to buy flowers, “felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.” I know the feeling—now. When I first read one of the book’s most pivotal scenes, in which Clarissa learns of Septimus’s death during her soirée, I interpreted the moment as the reality of war intruding on a bourgeois order oblivious to its own decline. It is that—but it is also the specter of mortality that underpins the anxieties of middle age. As Kelly reminds us, Clarissa thinks: “In the middle of my party, here’s death.” Yet this thought is immediately followed by an intense affirmation, Kelly writes: “She steps into the recognition that, despite the decisions she’s made, or perhaps because of them, ‘she had never been so happy.’”

Kelly finds parallels between this realization and a turning point in Woolf’s own life: At 40, in a moment of respite from her mental illness, she managed to write this book, and then her equally classic novel To the Lighthouse. This was, Kelly writes, “a season of fruitfulness” in which “she produced her most profound work.” At 21, I was ambivalent about Dalloway’s conciliatory ending, in which a woman keeps dread at bay by learning to revel in small and ordinary pleasures. But today, I look forward to the year, not far off, when I will be Clarissa’s age, so that I can read the book again, and see it with the kind of fresh eyes that only time and reading glasses can provide.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

Wolfe loved big, colorful characters, and he found plenty of them in the cadre of postwar American fighter pilots who helped develop supersonic flight—and, later, manned spaceflight. Wolfe’s subjects risked their lives in the skies over the California desert in military planes, then went on to join NASA’s Mercury program, becoming the first Americans in space. They quickly became Cold War celebrities whose virtues embodied a particular vision of heroism: competent, courageous, ready to lead the world to a new and limitless frontier. But in his account of the early space race, Wolfe contrasts their boy-band glamour with a more laconic aeronautical hero: Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier while secretly nursing broken ribs and later pushed a juiced-up supersonic fighter beyond the edge of the atmosphere, barely surviving the ensuing crash. Skilled, relentless, and taciturn, Yeager embodied “the right stuff”—that hard-to-define quality that the boundary-breaking pilots and astronauts ended up prizing above all else.  — Jeff Wise

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