Vanessa Bell’s design for the novel’s original dust jacket In asking us to empathize with Clarissa even while she shows us that Clarissa is a shallow, silly woman who has little to show for her fifty-two years, Woolf returns to all she rejected and finds the possibility that even the people she most rebelled against have souls, have regrets, and have ways of living with courage in spite of it all. Dalloway represents the world that Woolf’s mother (who died when Woolf was just thirteen) imagined for her, a conservative, social world that Woolf left behind for art, feminism, and Bloomsbury. Dalloway, but it’s more accurate to say that Mrs. Some people confuse Virginia Woolf with Mrs. If most of us need flowers, there is no one to tell Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ - we know we are with a married woman who is rich enough to have people around her to do errands for her. Woolf makes us care about a fancy middle-aged lady throwing a party.įrom the opening line of the book - ‘Mrs. A perfect high modernist work, here are some of the reasons why the book still matters. It tells the parallel stories of Clarissa Dalloway, who is throwing a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War One veteran. Dalloway, published in 1925, is set on a single day in London in June 1923. This article was first posted at The Awl and is reposted here with the author’s kind permission.
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