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Mrs. Dalloway

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Overview

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.

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Author Information

Bio of Virginia Woolf

Woolf , Virginia ( 1882 AD - 1941 AD ) A British novelist, essayist, and a feminist. Between the world wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury group. Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was brought up and educated at home. In 1895, following the death of her mother, she had the first of numerous nervous breakdowns. She later claimed to have been frequently molested by Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, and to have suffered psychologically from the experience. Following the death of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor and literary critic) in 1904, she moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two brothers to a house in Bloomsbury. She began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a civil servant and political theorist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Her novels are considered revolutionary as they pioneered literary modernism. Virginia Woolf is considered a leading modernist, and one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. She has, in the words of one critic, pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today. A history of depression, perhaps caused in part by the tumult of the Stephen household, caused Woolf to be committed to mental hospitals on several occasions. The ineffective treatment she received there left her with a distaste for doctors and sympathy for the ill that is evident in books such as Mrs. Dalloway. In 1941, Woolf ended her life by suicide. She filled her pockets with stones, and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her home in Rodmell. She left a suicide note for her husband: "I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life."

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Additional Info

Imprint

Rosetta Books

Filesize

536.50 KB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780795328411

Excerpt from: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning -- fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" --was that it? -- "I prefer men to cauliflowers" --was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace -- Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished -- how strange it was! --a few sayings like this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

For having lived in Westminster -- how many years now? over twenty, --one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven onlv knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.