Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf (Wordsworth Classics)

Society hostess Clarissa Dalloway - married to Conservative MP Richard - is giving a party.Her thoughts and feelings on that one day are interwoven with the interior monologues of the guests - her first love Sally Seton and the man she might have married Peter Walsh - and many other minor characters eg servants and folk she meets on a shopping trip that morning.Also her close proximity to the doomed soldier Septimus Warren Smith whose suicide she hears about later on that evening.Stream of consciousness was a fairly new writing technique which Virginia Wolf adopted having just read Joyce’s Ulysses. Her novel is more accessible than his but the technique and large number of characters mean it’s helpful to see the film first. That way U can put a face to the name and better follow all the interactions.Like many books by women the novel doesn’t really have much of a plot per se … but rather is all about people and how they interact with one another.Anita Brookner she ain’t but Mrs Dalloway is still worth 5 stars.

If you read one `modernist' novel - read this one. In Mrs Dalloway, Virgina Woolf achieves a balance of artistry and accessibility that is unique - for me Joyce is just too inaccessible.The novel is deceptive - what could be amazing about a book centred on a spolit London society hostess preparing for a party for her rich and cosseted friends and circle?But it is amazing...It took me about 20 pages to `get it' but once I did I was utterly hooked. This book is about peoples' emotional lives and Woolf takes you to a world of heart and feeling better than anyone I have ever read.And having taken you there..... she really delivers. In the end this book is about life or death? How can we, in a world with so much suffering and cruelty, go on living?Mrs Dalloway chooses life and one of the tragedies, of course, is that in the end Virigina Woolf took her own life.It is to her everlasting credit that she wrote a most life-affirming book.So, if you don't find life always a walk in the park and want something to touch your soul reach for this. It's a challange but so, so worth it.

Prompt delivery. Book as described - not read yet!

A classic

It's always invidious to judge a novel published decades ago by the standards of today. Unless it's a work of genius, the originality of the work may be obscured by what came later.I found this problem with Mrs Dalloway, because at first reading it seemed rather conventional when compared with much of 20th Century English literature. The central character, Clarissa Dalloway, is one of those achingly trite upper class metropolitan British women so familiar from films of the 1930s and 40s; think Celia Johnson in Brief Encounters or an up-market version of Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver. In novels of the period, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh included women (and men) of this type as figures of fun: dull, self obsessed and addicted to luxury. It takes an Angus Wilson, George Orwell or Iris Murdoch to breathe life into this kind of character.However, this is unfair to Woolf, who intended Clarissa to stand as a victim of her class and of British society: stifled, smothered and to some extent oppressed. As a young women she chose the conservative Richard Dalloway as her husband over the mercurial and eccentric Peter Walsh, and then gradually lost the spontaneity and freshness of her youth over the ensuing decades. At the age of 50, the spectre of heart disease hovers over her, the result of an attack of influenza (presumably in the pandemic of 1919). The reappearance of Walsh after a prolonged absence in India reminds her of happy days with him 30 years earlier.I made the mistake of reading Mrs Dalloway immediately after finishing James Joyce's Ulysses. By comparison it seems a slight work, although there are superficial similarities in its `modernist' form: set in a single location on a specific summer's day; stream of conscious technique; frequent switching from one character to another; the same events viewed from different perspectives. However, there the similarities end. I've read that some critics thought Mrs Dalloway was a `response' to Ulysses (which Woolf denied); if so, it's a pretty thin one. More a faint echo.Having said that, there are some interesting themes, such as the effect of shell shock on soldiers returned from the trenches, and the asinine response of many medical professionals. A telling scene is the one where Dr Holmes refers to his patient Septimus Smith (a war veteran driven mad by his experiences) as a coward for committing suicide by jumping out of a window. Woolf clearly empathises with the victims of shell shock, perhaps seeing parallels with the stultifying effect of early 20th Century British society on the minds and careers (and in her own case, sanity) of middle and upper class English women. The death of her character foreshadowed her own suicide in 1941, when she threw herself into a river and drowned.On a lighter note, there's an interesting reference to the introduction of British Summertime in 1916 and the effect the extra hour of daylight had on the social lives of ordinary working people. And some hints of happier, less constrained lives in the characters of Walsh and childhood friend Sally Seton - now the wealthy Lady Rosseter and a happily married mother of five sons.However, notwithstanding what I wrote at the beginning, this book seems disappointingly old-fashioned to the modern reader. Saving a couple of references to the length of young women's skirts, you'd never know the novel was set in 1922 when `the Jazz Age' was just getting underway. Where are all the flappers, wild parties and smart young men? You'll find them in Huxley's Antic Hay, published in 1923, a couple of years before Mrs Dalloway, and in Waugh's Vile Bodies, published in 1930. You'll find them retrospectively in Anthony Powell's A Buyer's Market, set in the mid-20s but published in 1952. By contrast, Mrs Dalloway's tedious party, and her social set, seems like something out of the novels of Henry James. There's nothing wrong with James, but his work belongs to the late 19th Century. Mrs Dalloway also seems to have its roots there (both in terms of narrative and its whole atmosphere) rather than in the 1920s. In Septimus Smith, there is an echo of one of George Gissing's educated but poor lower-class young men, desperately trying to make headway in the face of late-Victorian middle-class indifference.I suppose Woolf was not first and foremost a social commentator, and in truth not much of a modernist; more a brilliant amateur psychologist and proto-feminist, and should be admired as such.June 2014: I was disappointed (but not surprised) to read recently that Woolf thought Ulysses was in bad taste, although possibly she revised her opinion in later years. I don't know if this is true, but it tends to reinforce my opinion of Mrs Dalloway as the work of a much more limited artist (and person) than Joyce. Having said that, almost everyone who ever wrote is more limited than Joyce.

Definitely a great book. Good value for money and fast shipping.

I wanted to adore this book, it was recommended to me as the ultimate classic for character development, that it’s strips the person down in terms of their behavior and personality to all the things that lead to Mrs Dalloway to being Mrs Dalloway but on so many levels I just did not get this book, I couldn’t get my head into the heart of it. For a classic it’s very readable but I’d struggle to tell you what this book is actually about

Only just started reading but so far so good!