Mrs Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence - Hardcover

Woolf, Virginia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0099541335 ISBN 13: 9780099541332

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2011

Synopsis

A beautifully jacketed collection of seven Virginia Woolf short stories, all written around the theme of parties and brought back into print for the first time in forty years.

Mrs Dalloway's Party is a forgotten classic, and an enchanting piece of work by one of our most acclaimed twentieth century writers. A sequence of seven short stories that were written by Woolf in the same period as Mrs Dalloway -- the opening story in the collection was originally intended to be the first chapter of the novel - they beautifully showcase the author's fascination with parties and with all the emotions and anxieties which surround these social occasions. In 'The New Dress' a nervous young woman frets that her fellow guests are laughing at her yellow silk dress while 'Together and Apart' explores what happens to two people meeting for the first time in Clarissa Dalloway's drawing room.

In this collection of stories Virginia Woolf created a microcosm of society out of the excitement, the fluctuations of mood and temper and the heightened emotions of the party.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"With Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since."-Michael Cunningham,author of The Hours

The modern novel Mrs. Dalloway creates a vivid portrait of a single day in the life of one woman as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote her masterwork, she explored in a series of captivating sketches and stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party. Those seven stories collected here make up a kind of writer's notebook, a dynamic and delightful exploration of what Woolf called "party consciousness." As parallel expressions of the themes of Mrs. Dalloway, these seminal stories provide a valuable window into Woolf 's writing mind-and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.

Virginia Woolf one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel with such groundbreaking works as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The author of numerous collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

About the Author:

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 March 28, 1941 she committed suicide.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0099541335
• ISBN 13: 9780099541332
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80