What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing, Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention.