Mrs. Dalloway
By Virginia Woolf; Maureen Howard (Foreword by)
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780151009985, 216pp.)
Publication Date: October 2002
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Paperback (February 2007), Paperback (March 25, 2004), Audio Cassette (April 2003), Audio Cassette (April 2001), Paperback (January 1998), Paperback (July 1996), Hardcover (February 23, 1993), Paperback (September 1990)
Categories: Classics
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Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since.
"Mrs. Dalloway also 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
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel with groundbreaking works such as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The author of numerous collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form. Women and Writing was first published in 1942.
"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since. Mrs. Dalloway also 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
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