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One of One of Will Self's favourite books.
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax.
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Mrs. Dalloway Synopsis
Widely heralded as one of the first truly modern novels, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” was published in 1925 and is one of the author’s most popular and critically acclaimed works. All of the events of the novel take place on a single day in June 1923 and the novel’s perspective varies often as Woolf journeys inside the minds of many characters as they each experience the day and connect its events to the memories of their past. The two main characters are Clarissa Dalloway, a wealthy woman of high society who is planning a party for that evening, and Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the First World War, who continues to suffer from the trauma he experienced on the battlefield. Both characters are constantly aware of the passage of time, as Clarissa often reflects on her happy youth and her missed opportunities for love and passion and Septimus is haunted by his memories of the horror he witnessed and feels death looming ever closer and closer. Heartbreaking and powerfully evocative, “Mrs. Dalloway” is a timeless masterpiece about finding the joy in little things while never completely forgetting the fleetingness of life and the inevitably of death. This edition includes a biographical afterword.
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Virginia Woolf Press Reviews
'One of the few genuine innovations in the history of the novel'- New Yorker
'One of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers'- Guardian
About Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).
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