Mrs. Dalloway
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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Readers say *Mrs. Dalloway* is a richly layered, innovative novel praised for its deep character development and stream-of-consciousness style, reveal...
Truly one of my favorite novels of all time, and second only to To The Lighthouse among Woolf's work.
This book has no plot. I've read so many books filled with plot, particularly from the Victorian age, that seem so boring compared to this. It is a prime example of how the pace of ideas is just as important as the pace of events in a novel - in fact more so and to the point that they can even replace events to a degree.
The ideas of the book are at once simple and yet mysterious enough to benefit from and be improved by examination in multiple contexts and with multiple perspectives. The inaccessibility of the private mental lives of others, even the people we know best. The duality of all people - true ambivalence in which they are both good and bad, deep and shallow, mysterious and predictable - depending not just on differing parts of their personality but on the way the day has gone, both for the object and subject. The increase of feeling as we age, not in extremes but in nuance and complexity. The momentous heart of the trivial and frivolous. The danger of imposing our own assumptions on the lives and minds of others, especially the more different those others are from us.
Add to that one of the most vibrant depictions of early 20th century life in London. All the change of modernity. The shifting cultural values and behaviors. The planes and cars. The nature of authority. The relations between genders and classes. The cushioning of wealth - all flowers and time - and the exposure of poverty - a rocky path on wheels without tires. The impact of a war that ripped apart societies and jumbled them all up.
And Woolf's poetry above all. This is a prose poem.
It's just beautiful. It's honestly like a spiritual experience on every other page - every page sometimes. If you have trouble with it, come back to it in another frame of mind - more open to the beauty of language and mystery of life. Read slowly and think. And feel. What matter is the brain when the heart is everything.
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