Wednesday, May 14, 1975

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway published 50 years ago today

First posted ?.

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

First Publication: May 14, 1925


Category: novel


Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book:

“In Mrs. Dalloway, the novel on which the movie The Hours was based, Virginia Woolf” AZ “details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England.” WK Clarissa is preparing “for a party of which she is to be hostess, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman’s life.” AZ

Her conflicts about marriage are stirred up when she is visited by “the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh,” WK whom she passed over in favor of the “reliable Richard Dalloway.” WK

At her party that evening, she hears about the suicide of a World War I veteran. She “gradually comes to admire this stranger’s act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.” WK

“Created from two short stories, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the unfinished ‘The Prime Minister,’” WK “the novel contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English.” AZ “With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards 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.” WK “It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century.” AZ


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