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Amazon.co.uk Review
Clarissa Dalloway is civilised--without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. Mrs. Dalloway is as much a character study as it is a commentary on the ills and benefits society gleans from class. Through Virginia Woolf, we spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, and even an ex-lover. As she plans and executes one of her celebrated parties, she reveals inner machinations incongruous with her class-defined behaviors, that ultimately enable her to transcend them.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Review
" Mrs. Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
-- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
-- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
MRS DALLOWAY said she would buy the flowers herself. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
MRS DALLOWAY said she would buy the flowers herself. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
76 of 80 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
My favourite of Woolfs novels and also, I think, the most acessable to readers new to her work. It is the least complicated example of her style and the one where her stream of conciousness achieves its best synergy with characters and plot. Two central plotlines interweave, Mrs. Dalloway fighting submerged demons below a perfect veneer, while elsewhere in London Septimus Smith is overwhelmed by his. His character as a metaphor for the struggles in her mind works very well. Woolfs prose is on wonderful form here; with a clarity and beauty rarely matched it touches the heart, while opening a Bloomsbury cavern filled with class divide and false appearance. It is a very human, humane novel with a private, fragile quality that echoes it's themes - the mind, the life and marrying the two without harm.
52 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
MRS DALLOWAY
Virginia Woolf's fourth novel (1925) can be regarded as her first real approach to maturity, since she experiments with time and mingles present experience and past memories in an artistic way. Apart from the formal innovations, Woolf does not avoid the thematic challenge either: "I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense", she notes in her diary.
Mrs. Dalloway is set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, and we follow Clarissa Dalloway, the elegant wife of a Member of Parliament and perfect London hostess, through the course of this day which is going to culminate in the party she is going to give in the evening.
But there is much more to the novel than the superficial level of social activities: interwoven with the public world of post-war Britain is the female protagonist's inner life and her ambivalence about her other self - she wishes both to escape the social life and to enter it more fully; she feels both sheltered and anonymous, useful and trivial, committed and deluded.
Clarissa is looking for meaning in her life, primarily in her past, and we learn, among many other things, that she has chosen the safety of marriage to the rather ponderous Richard as opposed to the unpredictability of a life with Peter Walsh or the scandal of a relationship with a woman in order to preserve her own private self.
Virginia Woolf is interested in human personality and convicted of the right of the individual to possess and to cultivate their identity. Clarissa is thrown into a field of polar tensions in which on the one hand she strives for individuality and tries to distance herself from her environment; but in which on the other hand she also feels that she has to step out of her seclusion in order to take part in society.
And she proves herself capable of asserting herself in the life of society with courage and instinct. She is permanently ready to serve, to help and to support, seeing her role in society in terms of a personal task: through her parties she attempts to save people from their solitude, to establish relationships between them and make them feel the beauties of life.
Virginia Woolf has a gift to see behind people's social masks and to reveal in a very beautiful way how people live, how they love and hate, fear and long, and cope with the pleasures as well as the difficulties of everyday existence.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I loved this book, but have limited it to 4 stars because my appreciation may be partly that it begins with Clarissa Dalloway stepping across Victoria Street and walking to St James's park, which I do regularly and got me excited from the outset. However, I don't think it is that alone that made her seem so real. I do not particularly like the main character, but Woolf's writing makes you want to work her out; why she behaves as she does and made the past decisions she did. The stream of consciousness style in some sections does hurt your head a little, but she is using it to describe madness and doing so very effectively, and never goes on for so long that you simply want to give up (*cough*JamesJoyce*cough*). I have almost never felt such a sense of satisfaction at the final line of a book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A matter of life and death
If you read one `modernist' novel - read this one. In Mrs Dalloway, Virgina Woolf achieves a balance of artistry and accessibility that is unique - for me Joyce is just too... Read more
Published 4 months ago by frankie's owner
quite disappointing
I picked the book for a read out of curiosity and also because I realised I had never read anything by her . Read more
Published 4 months ago by G. Chambers
Dog ate it
This would have been an interesting read if I had managed to get to the end of it before my stupid dog ate it, quite literally munched it to its very end. Read more
Published 5 months ago by StretchyStace
Mrs Dalloway
This book was read after seeing The Hours. This film was set on Mrs Dalloway and brought the film more to life. Obviously the book is a classic and was written years ago. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Mrs. Karen A. Lee
The 'sample' was someone's Intro to the book
I watched the film 'Hours' which I enjoyed and which led me to be interested in the book. However, bearing in mind the price, I thought it best to utilise the 'download a sample'... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Mrs T
A novel to lose yourself in
The name Virginia Woolf likely conjures the image of an important cultural figure, a significant writer, but one with an intimidating reputation. Read more
Published 16 months ago by M.B.
Mrs Dalloway is magnificent
Virginia Woolf was influenced by Joyce's "stream of consciousness" as seen in such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, but is somewhat more accessible... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Guv
Genius
Virginia Woolf is growing on me at an alarming rate.
This novel uses the most beautiful of poetic language to describe the emotional landscape of it's main protaganist through... Read more
This novel uses the most beautiful of poetic language to describe the emotional landscape of it's main protaganist through... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Tim
Stylish Prose Gaudily Frames a Day-Long Character Study Emphasizing...
"Wealth makes many friends,
But the poor is separated from his friend." -- Proverbs 19:4 (NKJV)
Think of Mrs. Read more
But the poor is separated from his friend." -- Proverbs 19:4 (NKJV)
Think of Mrs. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Donald Mitchell
Introspective and considerate, funny
Well....nothing much happens, but that doesn't matter. Woolf's legendary stream of consciousness style of 'prose poetry' is not going to appeal to everyone, but I loved it. Read more
Published 23 months ago by trendytracey
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