Mrs. Dalloway : The First-edition Text With the Authors Revisions

Virginia Woolf's most famous novel, now in a new edition that reflects all of the author's revisions to the work.

This is the definitive edition of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, complete with a cover inspired by the original Hogarth Press design to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the original 1925 publication.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s tale of a day in the life of one upper-middle-class woman, is one of the best known and most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. It is a simple novel, on the one hand, in which its protagonist goes about London preparing for the party she will hold in the evening. It is also a complex novel, one that interweaves Mrs. Dalloway’s story with those of a shell-shocked veteran, of her old lover, of her unhappy teenage daughter. Together, they form a haunting, mesmerising picture of individual loneliness and post-World War I British society. As Virginia Woolf wrote of it: “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.”

This new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, published to mark the centennial of its original appearance, will be followed by new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves in celebration of their respective centenaries. All featuring specially commissioned covers that pay tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press, these editions are meticulously and sensitively edited by scholar and literary critic Edward Mendelson, and are the first to reflect the full range of revisions Virginia Woolf made to her three greatest novels.

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941) was an English writer whose novels, which often experimented with form, exercised a profound influence on the genre. Among her most famous works of fiction are To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway and her book of essays, A Room of One's Own, is one of the best-known works of literary and social criticism in the English language.

Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. His books include The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway; The Things That Matter; Early Auden, Later Auden; and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, published by New York Review Books in 2015. He has edited novels by Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells, and has written for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.