Synopsis
Influenced by Joyce's ULYSSES, Virginia Woolf's novel takes place within a 24-hour period and includes a stroll through the London streets that resembles Leopold Bloom's walk around Dublin. Woolf's narrative is structured out of the internal thoughts of characters Septimus Smith, the young, shell-shocked World War I veteran, and Clarissa Dalloway, the apparently perfect hostess who is preparing for her party that evening. Woolf elevates the world of the everyday, in which errands are done and buses are waited for, to a sublime evocation of the vital texture of life. But the interior monologues of Clarissa and Septimus also reveal a society that is deeply fractured beneath its smooth façade, and in which cruelty, madness, and death coexist with life's civilized pleasures. MRS. DALLOWAY is both brilliant and moving, and, with it, Woolf transformed the novel-of-manners into a work of profound psychological insights.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2002-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 197 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 11.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
A poignant portrayal of the thoughts and events that comprise one day in a woman's life.
Industry Reviews
"Virginia Woolf is almost alone...in the intricate yet clear art of her composition. Clarissa's day, the impressions she gives and receives...capture in a definitive matrix the drift of thought and feeling in a period, the point of view of a class, and seem almost to indicate the strength and weakness of an entire civilization....Clarissa...is conceived so brilliantly, dimensioned so thoroughly and documented so absolutely that her type...might be said to have been done 'inviolably and for all time'."
New York Times Book Review - John W. Crawford (05/10/1925)
"The cinema-like speed of the picture robs us a great deal of the delight of Mrs. Woolf's style. It has to be a little clipped, a little breathless; and the reading of her book is not so easy as it seems. Her wit is irresistible. In the end no one will complain of her for using all the freedom that she can. All her technical suppleness is needed to cope with the new form. It remains experimental in so far as we are uncertain what more can be done with it, and whether it can give the author's rare gifts full play. But something real has been achieved."
Crawford
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