Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)

Mrs. Dalloway 
Virginia Woolf, 1925
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
216 pp
ISBN-13: 9780156628709


Summary 
Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is the inspiration for Michael Cunningham's The Hours, the award-winning novel and Oscar-nominated film.

A 1925 landmark of modernist fiction that follows an the wife of an MP around London as she prepares for her party that afternoon.

Direct and vivid in its telling of details, the novel shifts from the consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway to that of others, including a shell-shocked veteran of World War I whose destiny briefly intersects with hers.

The feelings that loom behind such mundane events as buying flowers—the social alliances, the exchanges with shopkeepers, the fact of death—give Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness.

Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess.

As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old. (From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition, cover image, top right.)