Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition Paperback – September 24, 1990

Beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson.Mrs. Dalloway is a Modernist classic; it had a huge influence on literature and is a book to return to again and again... I first read it 30+ years ago, then again a few years ago, and started the paperback again this June (2025) because it's the 100th anniversary of the publication. Due to various constraints, I decided to "cheat" this June and listen to the audiobook rather than finish the paperback... I was glad I got this version...Juliet Stevenson reads wonderfully, with just the right level of accent and insight for the various characters whose inner thoughts and portrayed by Woolf; and London of 1925 is brought to life. If you want the audiobook version of Mrs. D., this is the one to get!

I must admit to some confusion. I think I have read Mrs. Dalloway, word for word, beginning to end.My uncertainty arises because I suddenly found myself, too soon, at the end of the book. My Kindle copy had jumped ahead about 15%. Not the fault of the book, my reader has been a tad twitchy. I did page back to where I thought I was, and I check against a few on line plot summaries. My real problem was that this is a book where you can miss parts and not always know that you have skipped ahead, or behind.The story of Mrs. Dalloway is the story of several people more or less connected to Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway. Each character is experiencing the same day, the day leading up to a party by the title character. Mostly we learn about these people by listening in on their thoughts, random mental notions and occasionally as they look at or speak with another of the fictional circle. The technique is a variation on Stream of Conscious. Not just the mental world of one person but of several , as they interact or move away from interaction.Ms Woolf's ability to take us into the heads of a diverse cast is art not artifice. The transitions from interior monologue to interior monologue are rarely announced. Rather we are lead into a thought that might apply to either the original thinker or the new one. That is the reader must pay attention or will have to go back a page and realign to the new character. Conclusion, this is not intended as a casual read. The audience for this book needs to stay focused.I had problems being this focused. Characters let their minds wonder. This is how normal minds work. But I found that it lead to my mind wandering and costing me the thread. Knowing that I have gone a woolgathering even as the fictional characters do, I suspect I have missed parts of a well written book.The physical setting Ms Woolf chooses is upscale, London. We are in or near Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Regent's Park and the time is just after World War One. Almost all of the characters are what I think of as the Mayfair Set. In my mind the cast is largely upper middle income, but not titled or financially independent. They are mostly conventional and all financially vulnerable. Clarissa herself has lived a life of privilege with no important responsibilities and we find her to be the shallowest. Her teenage daughter Elizabeth may grow past her mother, but her indecision to become a farmer or a doctor is almost comical given her lack of serious thought about either choice. Elizabeth has a history teacher, one of the few dependent characters who is at once filled with religious inspiration and jealous hatreds. The only other representatives of eh lower, or middle, middle class is Septimus, an man suffering what we would now call post traumatic shock from his war time experiences and his Italian wife, who trims hats and does not understand the threats in her husband's head.For the rest characters are more or less shallow. Their thoughts center on typical moneyed class problems: creating or keeping employment, surviving long lost loves, trying to remember when it was that life stopped being a thing of possibilities. No thought process is so important that the person has to stay focused on it until it is fully thought out. Always there are distractions.Virginia Woolf does tell a masterful story. The minds we inhabit are credible and well written. What are missing are clear individual idiosyncratic styles that would identify each individual brain in a minimum of words. This may be deliberate by Mw. Woolf. A way of saying we are all alike before we are all different.Mrs. Dalloway is worth reading. It may be a book that needs more than one reading. It is one that demands concentration. The lives we will visit are not that interesting. The technique used to tell us about them is.

Though there are some passing resemblances to Jane Austen, the comedy of manners, and Victorian narrative satire, this is a modernist novel and a fairly accessible introduction to Woolf, unless the reader is overly impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, now loud, and rarely without irony.Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love. She uses the term "Human Nature" ironically, making it refer to those individuals who cannot see with understanding, empathy or vision, substituting for "life" the ego's own conventional, reductive and limited sense of a world that's all surface and order.Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the head to spin and the earth: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures a microcosm of life not to mention the life of language itself.The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. It's a moment highly reminiscent of Gabriel Conroy's singular internal struggle and ultimate attainment of vision in the closing paragraphs of "The Dead" (Woolf was not especially fond of Joyce, but it's hard to believe she was not influenced by him). At that moment, Clarissa sees her affinity and even oneness with Septimus, a character who suffers internally but is capable of resisting the worse alternative of the "cures" offered by Dr. Bradshaw, one of the guests at Clarissa's own party. The insight produces action: one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as existential cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls. (The "Death of the Soul" is a theme introduced early in the novel by the insightful Peter, a "failure" by society's standards and his own admission and someone who cannot get the better of his fixations--on the irretrievable past and his own youth. By the story's end, it is not Peter but Clarissa who presents a whole and integrated self, capable of separating the illusory from the real, of the once dependent "Mrs. Dalloway" from the newly enlightened "Clarissa."Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it feels like a mechanical assembly next to the vibrant novel that is its source and inspiration. Ms. Woolf, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.

This is not an easy book. I stuck with it to the end but not sure it was worth it. It was on a list of must read books, the author has a unique writing style. Long paragraphs and very broken Ideas. Not one of my favorite classics. I much prefer a happier story. If you are looking for a challenge, go for it.