In 1997, the film version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was released in cinemas, based on a screenplay by Dame Eileen Atkins and with her friend Vanessa Redgrave playing the title role, a party-throwing socialite remembering the freedoms of her younger life. Here, we join Eileen Atkins looking back just as her heroine does – telling the story of her lifelong fascination with Woolf and recalling how she took on the challenge of adapting of one of the 20th century’s great novels for the big screen, and ended up winning the praise of the critics of the day, who called the resulting film ‘sensitive’, ‘delicate’ and ‘compelling’.