Mrs Dalloway

Description

With introductions by Carol Ann Duffy and Valentine Cunningham In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening, while in her mind she is much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa re-examines the choices she has made, hesitantly looking ahead to growing old. Undeniably triumphant, this is the inspired novelistic outline of human consciousness.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century A beautiful piece of writing * Guardian * I think To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway are sheer magic * Daily Express * Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness". * Guardian * A beautiful ode to dignity, memory and survival * Sunday Times *