Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141182490 ISBN 13: 9780141182490

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2000

Synopsis

Elegantly interweaving her characters' complex inner lives in an unbroken stream of consciousness, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway continues to enthral readers with its exploration of the human experience; of time, space, madness and regret. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter.

Past, present and future are brought together one momentous June day in 1923.
Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party while reminiscing about her childhood romance with Peter Walsh, and dwelling on her daughter Elizabeth's rapidly-approaching adulthood. In another part of London, war veteran Septimus Smith is shell-shocked and on the brink of madness, slowly spiralling towards self-annihilation. Their experiences mingling, yet never quite meeting, Virginia Woolf masterfully portrays a serendipitous unity of inner lives, converging as the party reaches its glittering climax.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay.

If you enjoyed Mrs Dalloway, you might like James Joyce's Ulysses, also available in Penguin Classics.

'The book's celebrated stream of consciousness is one of the few genuine innovations in the history of the novel'
New Yorker

About this title

Review:

Clarissa Dalloway is civilised--without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. Mrs. Dalloway is as much a character study as it is a commentary on the ills and benefits society gleans from class. Through Virginia Woolf, we spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, and even an ex-lover. As she plans and executes one of her celebrated parties, she reveals inner machinations incongruous with her class-defined behaviors, that ultimately enable her to transcend them.

Review:

"Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of Modernism in England, and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realizaztion of experimental acheivements that has completely broken with tradition."-- The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0141182490
• ISBN 13: 9780141182490
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: McNichol Stella, Showalter Elaine