Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Overview

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.
Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where Peter Walsh observes them. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire this stranger's act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782352879787
Publisher:	ALICIA MUS
Publication date:	01/04/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	581 KB
Language:	French

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was of course a great novelist, but she has influenced literature in many ways. She and her husband Leonard Woolf set up and ran the Hogarth Press which published works by key modernist writers as well as important works in translation. In their first five years they published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Sigmund Freud, but also rejected James Joyce's "Ulysses." She reviewed extensively and wrote on the art of writing and on the form of the novel. Through her stylistic innovations like the stream of consciousness, Virginia Woolf, like James Joyce, changed the course of literature.

Date of Birth:

January 25, 1882

Date of Death:

March 28, 1941

Place of Birth:

London

Place of Death:

Sussex, England

Education:

Home schooling

Table of Contents

General editors' preface; Notes on the edition; Acknowledgements; Chronology of Virginia Woolf's life and work; Introduction; Chronology of the composition of Mrs Dalloway; Mrs Dalloway; Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Textual notes; Appendix; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

As Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party in 1920s London, she is unexpectedly reunited with her old friend Peter Walsh in a novel that shifts among the inner monologues of its many characters and is darkened by the terrors and hallucinations of parallel protagonist Septimus Smith. Juliet Stevenson’s performance--with its lyricism and lilt--is perfectly matched to Woolf’s text and transports the listener. Stevenson produces a delightful range of distinct voices--her introspective, fragile Clarissa and stormy Peter are particularly strong. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. … It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century." (Michael Cunningham, The Hours.)

"Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call ‘consciousness’." – The Guardian

“Mrs Dalloway, … a book for a lifetime” -- Christine Dwyer Hickey.

From the Publisher

As Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party in 1920s London, she is unexpectedly reunited with her old friend Peter Walsh in a novel that shifts among the inner monologues of its many characters and is darkened by the terrors and hallucinations of parallel protagonist Septimus Smith. Juliet Stevenson’s performance--with its lyricism and lilt--is perfectly matched to Woolf’s text and transports the listener. Stevenson produces a delightful range of distinct voices--her introspective, fragile Clarissa and stormy Peter are particularly strong. (May)

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