‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary on Mrs Dalloway. A century has passed since Clarissa bought flowers for her midsummer party, and Radio 4 has commissioned a three-parter, with actress Fiona Shaw presenting. ‘What a plunge!’

The first programme had been playing for all of two minutes before my hopes began to wilt like a delphinium. ‘Her face adorns tote bags and internet memes,’ says Shaw of Woolf in the preamble, which sounds as though it has been lifted directly from the series pitch to the BBC. ‘I’ll be asking what… Virginia Woolf has to say to us today.’ There follow promises to explore Woolf’s writing and to ‘discover… how she challenged gender norms and wrote about mental health as human experience rather than just a medical condition’.

My heart sank further with the first of many clips from interviews with experts. One author describes, in detail, his discovery of Woolf in the hands of a girl he fancied at school. Most of the contributors, in fact, prove to be the saving grace of this series. There’s a fashion in documentaries at the moment........

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