“Doing very well in South Africa”: Fiona Melrose, Karel Schoeman, and the Intertextual Afterlives of Woolf ’s

Abstract

This essay examines two South African responses to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925): Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg (2017), and Karel Schoeman’s Die noorderlig (published in Afrikaans in 1975). Melrose’s novel patterns character and plot directly on Woolf’s with allusions to her biography and to other reworkings of the text. Schoeman’s performs a less obvious homage to Mrs Dalloway in its exploration of the tensions between politics and poetics and formal engagement with the demands of experimentation and realism. The essay assesses these different modes of response, points to Woolf’s influence beyond the anglophone literary world, and positions Schoeman’s work (in particular) as deserving greater attention from those speaking –and writing about–English (and its inheritances) in South Africa.