Mrs. Dalloway

2021 Reprint of the 1925 Edition. "Mrs Dalloway" (1925) by Virginia Woolf details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels. Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
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 challenge of growing old.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a Modernist writer, widely considered to be one of the most important of the twentieth century. She and her husband Leonard bought a hand-printing press in 1917, and they set up Hogarth Press in their house in Richmond, which published much of Virginia's work, as well as those of friends and fellow luminaries. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Set - an artistic, philosophic and literary group which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Today she is best remembered for her novels - in particular To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway - and her essay A Room of One's Own.