Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf


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

person AuthorVirginia Woolf
language CountryUnited Kingdom
api GenreDomestic fiction, Love storiesModernist Novel
copyright CopyrightPublic domain in the United States.
camera_alt Book cover-
book_online Ebooks-
description ScansGoogle-digitized
headphones AudioLibrivox | Internet Archive
Reader: Hannah Dormor
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