Mrs Dalloway

Description

On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess sets off to buy flowers for the party she is to give that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day Septimus Warren Smith, a shellshocked survivor of the Great War, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness. Bold and experimental, Mrs Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better with each reading. With an Afterword by Anna South.

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Leslie Stephen. After her father's death, Virginia moved with her sister Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell) and two of her brothers, to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they established the Hogarth Press. Virginia also published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1912, and she subsequently wrote eight more, several of which are considered classics, as well as two books of seminal feminist thought. Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life and committed suicide in 1941.

"Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of Modernism in England, and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realizaztion of experimental acheivements that has completely broken with tradition."-- The New York Times