Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began as two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". The book describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening, and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and backwards in time, to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories.
In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in "the middle of June" of 1923. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Septimus Smith.
In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on TIME Magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since its first issue in 1923.
Excerpted from Mrs. Dalloway on Wikipedia.
Mrs. Dalloway
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Domestic fiction, Love stories, Modernist Novel |
| Copyright | Public domain in the United States. |
| Book cover | - |
| Ebooks | - |
| Scans | Google-digitized |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Hannah Dormor 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 |
| Read online | Mrs. Dalloway |