The homesickness of Rezia Smith in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925)

Rereading Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925) for a student's MA exam next week, I had to take a break after noticing something I don't think I had ever noticed on earlier readings: the heartbreaking depiction of the Italian wife of shellshocked World War One veteran Septimus Smith. Lucrezia, or Rezia for short, married Septimus at the end of the war and moved to England with him, and it is the homesickness of the emigrant with a mentally ill husband that moves me: "Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 December 2024)