Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. Adapted from two short stories, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and “The Prime Minister,” Mrs. Dalloway is a moving portrait of a day in the life of one woman, her thoughts and perceptions, and the influence of war on the human psyche. Recognized as one of Woolf’s most important works, Mrs. Dalloway is often considered one of the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Great War, two Londoners lead vastly different lives. Each of them, in their own way, has been impacted by violence―one, Clarissa Dalloway, has had her aristocratic lifestyle interrupted and struggles to reconcile her idyllic past with a present reeling from conflict; the other, Septimus Warren Smith, is a wounded veteran left to fend for himself on the streets of England’s capital. Throughout the day, as Mrs. Dalloway readies herself and her home for a party in the evening, she muses on her youth in the countryside and fantasizes about leaving her husband Richard. Across the city, Septimus lives in a park with his estranged Italian wife, Lucrezia. Suffering from a mental breakdown, he is struck with a series of powerful hallucinations and ultimately taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital. Well educated and decorated in battle, he has been left behind by the society he fought to protect, the very society gathering that night at Mrs. Dalloway’s opulent home.Mrs. Dalloway is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King’s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father’s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London’s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf’s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.
