Virginia Woolf considered having Clarissa Dalloway kill herself in the original version of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Eventually, she changed her mind and did otherwise. After the turn of the century, Ian McEwan would publish what would seem like an homage, Saturday, which many reviewers did not connect immediately to Mrs. Dalloway. Is it because people are not familiar with the novel? Perhaps it is because Mrs. Dalloway remains fodder for English majors at the undergraduate level while people from other disciplines can graduate from universities without having read this work from the modernist period. If we seek any evidence for the failed imagination in society today, we need only regard television as the most damning source. The repetitive and mind-numbing programming has left viewers scurrying for cable networks which offer more demanding viewers a wider array of programming. Is television better because people speak quickly in laughably unbelievable patterns of dialogue? I would like to believe that people are genuinely that witty. If such places exist, I'd like to know where they are.