Mrs Dalloway
By Virginia Woolf
(Vintage Books, Paperback, 9780099470458, 208pp.)
Publication Date: March 25, 2004
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover, Paperback, Hardcover, Paperback, Paperback, Paperback, Paperback
Categories: Classics
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In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman’s life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening, while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa re-examines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. Undeniably triumphant, this is the inspired novelistic outline of human consciousness.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.
"Mrs. Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours











