Mrs. Dalloway
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. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.