Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf 1925
This novel follows Clarissa Dalloway through one London day as she prepares to host a party. Big Ben marks the passing hours while her thoughts move between present encounters and memories of youth.
249 pages 4h 50m reading time
- One of the best-known novels of modernism, the early 1900s movement that broke from traditional ways of telling stories.
- Follows the private thoughts of its characters as they drift, so a single ordinary day holds whole lives of memory, regret, and feeling.
- Sets Clarissa's world beside that of Septimus Smith, a soldier traumatized by the First World War, showing how the war's damage lived on in peacetime London and how poorly doctors understood shell shock.
- Helped make "stream of consciousness," writing that copies the flow of a person's thoughts, a lasting tool for novelists who came after.
- Inspired Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours," which won the Pulitzer Prize and became a major film.
Clarissa was meant to die
Woolf first planned for Clarissa to kill herself, then gave that fate to a new character, Septimus.
Grew from a short story
The novel began as "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," a story about Clarissa going out to buy gloves.
First called The Hours
While writing, Woolf called the book "The Hours," after the clock that marks the day.
Printed by her own press
It came out from the Hogarth Press, run by Woolf and her husband, with a cover by her sister.