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Mrs. Dalloway is Virginia Woolf's best known novel. This landmark novel is a masterpiece. While the book seems to take place in a single day in the life of the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway, it is much more.
Mrs. Dalloway is preparing for a dinner party to be held that evening. As she goes about her day, her mind wanders to the people who will be attending her party and her relationship with them. Her husband, Richard Dalloway; Peter Walsh, a man she might have married instead; Sally Seton, a woman with whom she shared a forbidden kiss; Septimus Warren Smith, a man slowly sinking into madness.
The narrative focus shifts back and forth from Mrs. Dalloway to the characters who will be attending her dinner party in a groundbreaking stream of consciousness.
The dinner party, like the novel, is a success.
About the author
Virginia Woolf was a luminous novelist, a prolific essayist and book reviewer, and a diarist. With her husband Leonard, Woolf established and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by influential modernist writers. In their first five years, they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud. Woolf's haunting writing, her succinct insights into feminist, artistic, historical, political issues, and her revolutionary experiments with points of view and stream-of-consciousness altered the course of literature.
