Virginia Woolf

A poignant portrayal of the thoughts and events that comprise one day in a woman's life.

Mrs. Dalloway

clara

bella <3

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. he went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square . 

a young man (that is what Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army. Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought. 

a terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. 

no, no, no! he was not in love with her any more! he only felt, after seeing her that morning, among her scissors and silks, making ready for the party, unable to get away from the thought of her; she kept coming back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage; which was not being in love, of course: it was thinking of her, criticising her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her. 

“i will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. what is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. what is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

for they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? -some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. Tames's Park on a fine morning - indeed they did.

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels. Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning. Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where Peter Walsh observes them. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window. Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire this stranger's act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.

Mrs Dalloway

dima

'She always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.' 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. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

Helen 

Francesca 

Maureen

“As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship… let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”

*** 

Woolf's mastery of the interior monologue and stream of consciousness allows her to seamlessly shift from one character's thoughts to another. The rich use of imagery also colors the story in a dramatic fashion. Consequently, it became a problem for me as I found myself lost in her words that I overlooked the matter at hand— I had to reread a lot of pages. 

Overall it was a great book; it took me a while to adjust to Woolf's writing style as this was my first time reading her. Truly, one must possess enough mental energy to absorb the text (plenty of brain cells exhausted here) and appreciate it in all its splendor.

Anna 

i cannot even put into words how beautiful this book was.
 it's character driven so woolf describes the feelings and thoughts of clarrisa's friends and clarissa herself. this book is definitely not for everyone because nothing really happens and it describes just one regular day, but when you really look into it (and have the patience to do so) you find there lots of beautiful thoughts and feelings throughout the book. it's about love, loss, missed opportunities and of course - mental illness. 
virginia put her whole heart into this piece and i really enjoyed reading it, reading basically about her life experiences and her own thoughts that she reflects in mrs dalloway. 
like i said, it's really hard for me to describe this book, but it's definitely one of the weirdest (in a good way) books that i have read and everyone should give it a try.

Patrick Book

I didn’t expect to like this book. There’s not much that happens. I’m not a huge fan of her style of writing, with its never ending parenthetical strings of commas extending sentences forever and being parenthetical. But there’s a lot going on underneath and it is basically all character development and it turns out to be really interesting. Well done, Virginia Woolf.

Joub

Colton Ray

I forgot I even read this book. At first I gave it an honest try, then resorted to skimming pages, then chapters, then finally just read summaries on SparkNotes. This was unfortunately required reading for my British Lit class. My teacher loved it, most of the girls in the class liked it, and most of the guys were indifferent or confused by it. 

I wouldn't be the least interested in the plot of this book if I could even find one. It gets lost among all the flowery, poetic sentences. If Mrs. Woolf had an editor, I can't understand why he didn't tell her to cut, cut, cut this boring behemoth down to a reasonable size, preferably novella-length.

Critics always praise Virginia Woolf as a beautiful writer, but I honestly didn't find her writing beautiful. Dalloway has some of the most self-indulgent writing I've ever read in a novel, and should never have been as long as it is now. The sentences run on and on and never seem to go anywhere or say anything of susbstance. I remember one particularly egregious example was a sentence that had about ten colons, five semicolons, 12 parentheses, and almost 20 commas. In one sentence. Now picture trying to read that out loud. It's nonsensical. This was practically unreadable for me.

The story is not only overly masturbatory, it's dull as a stone-age cooking knife. I've never been so eager to NOT read a book. Eyes glazed over, skipping paragraphs, yawning, thinking of everything but the characters in this story and their overwrought, melodramatic meanderings - that was me throughout the majority of this story. I kept waiting for the plot to pick up, for the pace to move along, for something to happen, but nope. The climax of the story is a suicide, but it's mostly just used as a plot device to give Mrs. Dalloway more reason to contemplate life and death, the same things she's been mulling over in her incessant internal dialogue for the whole of the book.

The only character I kind of liked was Peter, because I related to him a little with his unrequited love and constant regret and indecision. He was unlikeable and had character flaws, but he came off as real. I couldn't care less about the other characters.

Honestly, I don't really care that this is a "classic" novel. I just evaluate books on how well they are written and crafted and balance that with how they make me feel. This novel made me feel nothing but boredom and relief when I finally got to stop taking quizzes and answering questions about it. I'm actually angry I was forced to read this and act like it was well-written and interesting when it's anything but.

I think Mrs. Woolf needed to find a judicious editor and go back to junior high to relearn how to construct basic sentences without all those beautiful, fluffy, way-too-dense adjectives and similes.

In case you couldn't tell, I hated this book.

Sarah Sammis

I came to reading Mrs. Dalloway in a back to front fashion. First I read The Hours by Michael Cunningham and saw the film. Then I went back and read the source material for the Women Unbound Challenge.

What I hadn't expected was just how much The Hours for all it's time travel and artistic license mimics and parallels the original novel. If Mrs. Dalloway were an orange, The Hours would be fruit opened up and taken apart.

Clarissa Dalloway is planning a party. The plans bring to light the lives and troubles of the people in her life: an ex lover, her daughter, a teacher and a war vet who is suffering from shell shock. Coming to the book via an adaptation, I could see the themes unfolding before I would have otherwise.

I think that the experience of having read and loved The Hours and having seen the film helped my understanding and appreciation of Virginia Woolf's novel. By itself I might have found it a ponderous and oddly paced novel.

It was very beautiful writing in the kind of way that makes you sit and appreciate the world, but it was so boring. I thought maybe the ending would be worth it but it just disappointed. Didn’t find myself excited to finish it. 🌸🌹

Sadie Hoffman

Claudia Beneyto

Virginia this is not it…. it’s boring, everything is filler and the actual plot is mediocre at best.

took me quite a while to get into it, mostly because of the writing style and i was getting scared that i wouldn’t finish it, but i found myself engrossed all of a sudden. i loved the omniscient pov, and i loved all the perspectives we were in. there were some hard-hitting moments that made me emotional, namely Septimus’ story (he was my favorite pov). so much thematic depth ranging from class dynamics to the omnipresence of death. <3

jack

happiness is this! i really enjoyed this, though i think i would’ve enjoyed it more had i not yet read to the lighthouse or the garden party. the former tops dalloway’s grandiosity and character study, the latter does a better job with the basic story structure. really takes a great deal from mansfield, but formulates it in a way mansfield never had the chance to.

First published in 1925, “Mrs Dalloway” is a novel by Virginia Woolf that chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an English aristocrat living after the Great War. Amongst her most famous works, “Mrs Dalloway” deals with such themes as mental illness, existentialism, feminism, and bisexuality. A classic novel that deserves a place on every bookshelf and is not to be missed by fans of Woolf's seminal work. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer. She is widely hailed as being among the most influential modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer of stream of consciousness narration. Woolf suffered numerous nervous breakdowns during her life primarily as a result of the deaths of family members, and it is now believed that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse at Lewes, aged 59. Other notable works by this author include: “Pattledom” (1925), “A Room of One's Own” (1929), “The Captain's Death Bed: and Other Essays” (1950). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this classic novel now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Laura Mauler

A book that is almost entirely description and no plot, written in a stream-of-consciousness style; in short, my ultimate snooze-fest. There were times this weekend when I felt open to description that served no purpose, to simply have a picture painted in my mind, and at these times I liked the book. The rest of the weekend I was more my normal self, wanting a story that would grab me and whisk me away, and at these times I was bored with the book. Glad to have read it in case it comes up sometime in my life, and that's about the best feeling I can muster for this book.

What can be said harshly about the incredible Virginia Woolf?

More character development than plot-driven, the novel delivers, poignantly, a painful tolling through the hours of life.

Lara Engle

What a slog! I'm sorry, Virginia Woolf. I want to agree with you, but I can't stay awake long enough to get through this book about nothing. And it's not about nothing in a good "Seinfeld" sort of way. It's seriously about nothing.

Michael Springer

How does one review a book so unusual? Michael wondered.

This raw food diet still had everything inside churning like the clothes as they spun around the driers. The clinks as buttons slid along the metallic sides, the rasp of the air conditioner that was never turned off because it didn't work at all anyway, the light coming through the pain of the laundry room's one small window, as Michael looked out upon the shimmering light that hit the water of the swimming pool, always clean, always ready for someone to dive in, despite the mid-December chill in the air, despite the fact that not a toe would touch that water for months. 

Michael scratched his nose with his right index finger. He didn't know how to review Mrs. Dalloway.

But isn't that always the challenge with good books? With those books that open their eyes and meet yours head on; where an exchange is made; those books that take something from you, and give you something else in its place, your spleen now in the book, a glowing white light in its place. What does that even mean, he wondered? Can one give back to a book? Or does one only take? Does one only "give back" by paying the author for the text? What a cold process that seems. But, what can someone give to a book that has been around for nearly a century--the author's cells now broken apart from one another and spread about, either throughout the dirt around the space where her coffin once was, or still locked away inside (and let it be known, Michael thought once again, that I never want to be put inside of a coffin; I'd rather be experimented upon, or used by Von Hagens in one of his exhibits)--what can one contribute to a work that has been declared Permanent, a diamond that will not age as time passes, like The Illiad,, like Othello, The Portrait of a Lady, or Confessions of an Heiress? 

Perhaps if I hadn't eaten so much crappy food before switching my diet, I wouldn't be rushing out of the laundromat every half an hour to take a dump, Michael thought. 

After finishing laundry, he decided he would take the light rail to campus and finally buy his school books. He didn't know why, but the trip on the light rail from home to campus was something he still looked forward to, even after taking it dozens of times: there was nothing he could put his finger on regarding the experience that was noteworthy, yet he smiled as he thought about the trip. Was it the mythical stature he'd given to education that made this trip enjoyable? The pilgrimage to a place of learning, the journey towards knowing? But, he'd come to terms with the fact that none knew, truly; all viewed the world through their own terministic screens (he enjoyed working terms he'd learned from grad school into his thoughts, though he'd feel like a jackass to drop them into conversation). Everyone had a socially conceived network of abstract notions through which every flower, airplane, stray dog had to be filtered before it registered in the mind. We place forms upon everything, when there is truly no division. 

He went next door to the gym, because he couldn't hold it any longer. Again, there was nobody working out, although the television that hung from the ceiling was playing some soap opera, the six fans that swayed dangerously as they whirled above the workout equipment. 

How much power is wasted every day to keep a city humming incessantly? Could we not leave the television off, the fans off, the lights off, until someone came in to actually use the facilities? Couldn't the air conditioner be turned off during the winter, or taken out, since it does fuckall anyway? (Joy often laughed at him when he used British words, like fuckall and rubbish.) 

Like many times in the past, he wished he could live somewhere that stars were clearly visible. He remembered driving through the expanses of New Mexico, the lights from the cars the only things breaking the darkness, hindering the starlight. Perhaps, instead of going with Joy out to the casino this weekend, they would drive far out of the city and do some star gazing. The starry sky, like chasing fireflies in the summer, was something from a collective childhood he tapped into occasionally during reveries; he was born in a big city, and moved to another, yet pined for both fireflies and starry skies. But he couldn't stand the thought of living outside the city--there was fuckall to do out there. 

After finishing his movement, and washing his hands for forty five seconds, he left the gym and walked past the swimming pool. One of the neighborhood's many stray cats slunk along the beige fence like a secret agent, half-hidden by the flowering bushes. The sky was Arizona cloudy, which is called Mostly Sunny anywhere else; a sweep of clouds covered half the sky, while the rest was entirely blue. It was a beautiful day, December 29th of 2010.

He went back into the dim, florescent light of the laundry room. Opening the thick book he'd brought with him, he thought again about all the reviews he still needed to catch up on. And he still didn't know how to review Mrs. Dalloway. And he was totally at a loss about how to review Orlando, but he put that out of his mind as he gazed down into A People's History of the United States. His eyes met Howard Zinn's, and he resisted the urge to look away.

Miguel Ângelo Queirós 

O relato de um dia de Junho, no quotidiano mundano de Londres dos anos 50, que se torna deslumbrante pela escrita única de Virginia Woolf.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

I don’t think this one was for me - just didn’t enjoy it at all

Jemima Scott

poprika

Really hard to get trought, hard to follow, i found the story pointless and characters nor likable or intresting... might give it a shot when i'm older but for now - not my jam. Too bad

Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades. This is a novel to read and cherish, if only to marvel at Woolf’s linguistic acrobatics. Words and phrases swoop and soar like swallows. Woolf’s sentences are magnificent: sinuous, whirling, impeccably detailed. As narrative perspective shifts from character to character—sometimes within a single sentence—readers come to understand the oh-so-permeable barrier between self and other. Through Clarissa we meet Septimus Warren Smith, his wife Rezia, and a cast of dozens more, all connected by the “leaden circles” of Big Ben marking the passage of every hour, by the pavements of Bloomsbury that lead everywhere and nowhere. Modernist London has never been portrayed more sublimely: replete with birdsong and flowers, resplendent in sunshine, youthful yet eternal—and even in the aftermath of war and pandemic, resilient. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s attempt to express that which may be inexpressible. It offers a close examination of how difficult it is, even when our hearts are brimming, to say what we really feel; and it examines the damage we inflict through our reticence with words, our withholding of love. It is a novel of the soul, and a work of immense beauty. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Ah yes, my favourite genre: no plot, just vibes. I genuinely enjoyed reading this, although most of the sentences confused me terribly. I would recommend this to anyone who dreams of being an english society wife with no responsibilities except being in love with your childhood best friend who is also an english society wife (me).

Carine

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels. Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel addresses Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.

By Virginia Woolf Mrs. Ms Miss Dalloway Galloway Calloway Wolfe Harcourt Hardcover Book

Kwan Ann Tan

Have just finished reading this in the library while slightly delirious from hunger & this damn sore throat; but god, I love Woolf! This book is everything I love about a good classic: tortured past relationships where neither party is quite over it (shoutout to Fitzgerald lmao) ruminations on time & societal constructs as well as just?? human relationships in general gosh I love this book time to destroy my love for it by tearing it apart in an essay

Claudia Ganea

Although I had to write a paper on this in high school, it's the first time I've actually sat down and read it - and I loved it, just as I knew I would.

Woolf's musical writing will probably always get to me...

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. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

Vanya de Lang 

This novel was a very interesting read. Mrs Dalloway is expertly written, Woolf perfected the art of 'interior monologue'. With twists and turns the novel guides you to a set destination of wonder, one which you would never expect. The narration is done through the interior monologue of quite a few persons, whom cross each other's paths throughout the day of Mrs Dalloway's party. I would definitely recommend reading it.

Lara Reis

i am on an essay to read all of the books of virginia woolf and i’m not sure how this one ranked for me. i enjoy pretty much the way she flows through points of view in one second and how things are still clear this way.

Tiefgründig, schwierig, traurig. Das ganze Buch handelt sich um die Gedanken der Charaktere. Viel Raum für Interpretation 

Mrs. Dalloway

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