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One of One of Will Self's favourite books.
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax.
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Mrs. Dalloway Synopsis
This masterpiece of modern literature by the author of Orlando is an intimate and probing account of a single day in the life of a London society woman. It's the spring of 1923 and Clarissa Dalloway must prepare her Westminster home for the guests she will receive this evening. As the wife of a Parliament Minister, proper decorum is of upmost importance, and she decides to buy the flowers herself. Walking through the streets of London, Clarissa's entire life swirls through her mind as Big Ben tolls out the passing hours of the day. On her journey, Clarissa will encounter friends and memories; regrets and dreams of what might have been. From her happy youth to the realities of World War I and the very logical reasons for marrying her husband, her stream of consciousness is evoked with lucidity and depth by one of the twentieth century's most important literary stylists. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is ';conceived so brilliantly, dimensioned so thoroughly and documented so absolutely that her type, in the words of Constantin Stanislavsky, might be said to have been done ';inviolably and for all time'' (The New York Times). ';Virginial Woolf is one of the few writers who changed life for all of us. Her combination of intellectual courage and painful emotional sensitivity created a new way of perceiving and living in the world.' Margaret Drabble This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
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Virginia Woolf Press Reviews
'One of the few genuine innovations in the history of the novel'- New Yorker
'One of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers'- Guardian
About Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).
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