Mrs. Dalloway: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past--the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it.
"Perhaps her masterpiece...Exquisite and superbly constructed...Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can." -E. M. Forster
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Community Reviews
What witchcraft is this? My husband was right. I want to highlight every sentence. 5 stars.
"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. "
Septimus is a veteran of the First World War:
“'Look, look, Septimus!' she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatsoever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself."
2017:
Even though I gave this 4 stars, I didn't actually enjoy this book. It just didn't work for me. My husband thinks I need to wait a few years and re-read it, but it was a bit painful. There are beautiful parts and interesting parts, but it wasn't all that interesting to me as a whole. I was reading to get through it.
It reads like someone imagining a story, or just thinking, going back and forth between a few characters without anything actually happening. It reads like a dream with a lot of medium-painful nostalgia and no action.
The internal demons that Mrs. Woolf suffered herself gives this novel so many layers to peel through. Knowing that she committed suicide herself will go a long way in your own reading, if you're just picking it up. (In 1941, the beginning of WWII, at the start of another breakdown she feared would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in the River Ouse.)
I encourage you to take the time to read through something like SparkNotes while you're reading this. There really is so much depth to this novel that it's hard to delve in deep enough on your own and fully appreciate the book as it deserves.
In this case, as the consumer of that content, I have to admit that while I enjoyed the book and found it insightful and funny, I also found it difficult to read. I have two kids under the age of four in the house and get interrupted every three to five minutes on average.
For most of the books I read, the interruptions are manageable. For this modernist structure where you sorta free wander with no direction, it’s essentially impossible to read. What happens is you pick up the book, you try to locate what is happening within the context of the story, you search around a bit looking for cues, you realize the task is basically impossible, and then Alice (your 3.5 year old) asks you whether it’s three o clock yet and whether you can go to the park. You answer those questions and then start back at trying to locate what is happening in the story.
Is this form of storytelling more meaningful than something more straightforward? I suppose it probably is. I found some of the digressions extremely insightful, particularly on the relations between men and women and between men and achievement or whatever you would call the typical aim of male ambition in British society.
Nonetheless, I don’t think the book lends itself well to my particular life stage at this moment.
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