Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is shell-shocked and on the brink of madness.
On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway - fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess - sets off to buy flowers for the party she will host that evening. She is preoccupied with though
Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel of feminism, existentialism, and self-realization is an essential read for all lovers of classic literature.Virgina Woolf’s classic novel centers around Clarissa Dalloway, a married high-society woman in post–World War I London who is preparing for a party at her home in the evening. Acutely aware of her standing among other members of her elite social class but yearning to find her true self, Clarissa embodies the internal and external conflicts of women in the early twentieth century. As she makes her way about London, Clarissa’s stream of consciousness is constantly interrupted by memories of her past, giving the reader a keen insight into the mind of a woman undergoing an existential crisis. Beloved by generations of readers, Mrs. Dalloway is a landmark novel that explores themes of feminism, mental illness, and self-realization.
Mrs Dalloway, created from a series of short stories, is one of Virginia Woolf's best-known novels. Thematically it conveys a rich and genuine humanity, in part through Woolf's use of interior perspectives. This edition provides a substantial introduction, which discusses the composition history of the novel and shows how Woolf's reading, writing, and personal life as well as the world around her contributed to the book. Explanatory notes review decades of scholarship while identifying numerous allusions to Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and others. A complete list of textual variants shows differences among all English language editions of the novel published in Woolf's lifetime. The notes call attention to variants of particular interest, including Woolf's substantial addition, at proof stage, to the scene of Septimus' suicide. This edition also includes Woolf's seldom-reprinted 1928 introduction, along with a full chronology of composition, and a more general chronology of Woolf's lif
A Vintage Classics edition of Virginia Woolf's dazzling, groundbreaking novel that follows one day in a woman's life.Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway--a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life--Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's first complete rendering of what she described as the "luminous envelope" of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.
This Norton Critical Edition includes:The 1925 first American edition text, introduced and annotated by Anne Fernald.A map of Mrs. Dalloway's London.An unusually rich selection of contextual materials
It is hard to find anyone nowadays who will dare venture a bad word on Mrs Dalloway: its status as a pioneer feminist text and a brilliantly experimental work is wholly secure. At the time of its publ
This first volume of its kind contains the complete text of and guide to Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, plus Mrs. Dalloway's Party and numerous journal entries and letters by Virginia Woolf relating t
This first volume of its kind contains the complete text of and guide to Virginia Woolf's masterpiece plus Mrs. Dalloway's Party, and numerous journal entries and letters by Virginia Woolf relating t
