Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Overview

"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. ... It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century." (Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.)

"Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call 'consciousness'." - The Guardian

"Mrs Dalloway, ... a book for a lifetime" -- Christine Dwyer Hickey.

Mrs Dalloway describes a day in 1923 in the life of an upper-class Londoner, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares for a party she is hosting. In lyrical language, Virginia Woolf describes Clarissa, her memories, day-dreams, regrets and fears, to masterfully entwine the past, present and future in what is regarded as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. "The novel's opening pages are probably the most ecstatic representation of running errands in the Western canon." (Evan Kindley). The novel is essentially plotless; using the springboard of the mundane preparations for a society party, it travels backwards and forwards through time, drawing the reader into the consciousness of the characters.

Mrs Dalloway, perhaps Virginia Woolf's most popular work, and perhaps semiautobiographical, is a book worth reading and rereading.

Virginia Woolf was a luminous novelist, a prolific essayist and book reviewer, and a diarist. With her husband Leonard, Woolf established and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by influential modernist writers. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud. Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781398180
Publisher:	Benediction Classics
Publication date:	05/15/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.26(d)
Lexile:	950L (what's this?)

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was a luminous novelist, a prolific essayist and book reviewer, and a diarist. With her husband Leonard, Woolf established and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by influential modernist writers. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud. Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.

Date of Birth:

January 25, 1882

Date of Death:

March 28, 1941

Place of Birth:

London

Place of Death:

Sussex, England

Education:

Home schooling

Table of Contents

General editors' preface; Notes on the edition; Acknowledgements; Chronology of Virginia Woolf's life and work; Introduction; Chronology of the composition of Mrs Dalloway; Mrs Dalloway; Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Textual notes; Appendix; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

As Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party in 1920s London, she is unexpectedly reunited with her old friend Peter Walsh in a novel that shifts among the inner monologues of its many characters and is darkened by the terrors and hallucinations of parallel protagonist Septimus Smith. Juliet Stevenson’s performance--with its lyricism and lilt--is perfectly matched to Woolf’s text and transports the listener. Stevenson produces a delightful range of distinct voices--her introspective, fragile Clarissa and stormy Peter are particularly strong. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Perhaps her masterpiece...Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster

"Hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations felicitously experimenting with the English novel.” –Jorge Luis Borges

"Clarissa [Dalloway] is...conceived so brilliantly, dimensioned so thoroughly and documented so absolutely that her type, in the words of Constantin Stanislavsky, might be said to have been done 'inviolably and for all time.'" –The New York Times

From the Publisher