Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1696 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

Customer Reviews

A sad lot!!
I have always struggled to read Virginia Woolf but I finished this with great satisfaction tinged with bemusement. Most of the characters are seriously mad. Richard Dalloway is the only one who is even remotely sane - and the only one who has a job. This may be more than coincidence. The others have far too much time for egocentic languishings which doesn't help their edge of sanity status. Septimus Smith was mad before he was shell-shocked in WW1 - he seemed only to go to war to fight for Shakespeare! Peter Walsh is a drifter and Clarissa Dalloway is utterly self-absorbed. One wonders if she would have taken her own life had she had more to think about than her own ego-centric stream of consciousness. This was a very good read but I think it will be my only successful flirtation with V.W. I only read it after someone gave me a copy of Michael Cunningham's "The Hours".

really rather irritating
My teacher's decision to study Mrs Dalloway for A Level was met with a great deal of frustration. Some had tried to read it, some had merely watched the film, but most of us knew it as the book our mothers love. I read it before lessons began (as one should with literature which always loses something if looked at through A Level eyes...), and found myself stuck. The writing style is of course innovative and interesting - stream of consciousness, very little dialogue - but I felt Woolf forgot to actually invent a plot along the way.

I am probably too young really to understand the feelings of a 53 year old woman. It was unfortunate to be in the mind of a woman who considers her life to be finished, just at the point of setting out for university - I don't recommend this to teenagers. I don't think a book entirely devoted to revealing the normality of someone's brain patterns is really very interesting. As it is, it seems to me that Woolf was too consumed with her clever narrative style, and neglected to offer any memorable plot. In fact the sub-plot of Septimus Warren Smith was the only element I found to keep me reading to the end - he is overall a more vivid, detailed and emotive character, and I found myself flicking on to find the next passage about him and his interesting wife Luzrezia. Clarissa, in comparison, bored me, and the excuse that she is not supposed to be defined ('never say of someone they are this or they are that') just seemed to me an excuse.

I would not recommend this to a young woman excited by life and the future - Clarissa's melancholy manages to instil negativity in almost everything, even her own daughter. Yes, Clarissa appreciates the life going on around her (eg, the bees buzzing, ducks waddling...) but she is so infuriatingly detached that her little comments about the joys of living mean nothing.

I've since looked at Woolf's Orlando and have found it to be much wittier and more interesting, and entirely different. Might it be that the world has mistaken Mrs Dalloway for a literary materpiece when all it actually represents is an experiment in narrative, during a time of depression in Woolf's life?

A thoroughly modern masterpiece
I picked this book up directly after reading 'To the Lighthouse' and I must say that nothing describes these two novels better that to call them 'prose poems'. They are two differing experiments in structure and style and as such it takes a few pages to grasp their unfamiliarity.

For instance in Mrs Dalloway there can be times when there is a proliferation of new characters names, which if you try to follow each name as in a conventional novel it can be a bit daunting. The moment of revelation for me came when I realised that the device of naming fleeting characters is used in order to heighten their subjective opinions! If it was a film I suppose it would be the equivalent of passing through twenty or more narrators. The interplay of differing subjective opinions/emotions is breathtaking.

Not only this, but the narrative leaps around London with similar ease. In fact the syntax of the plot is pure cinema - the sensual and the emotional wins through.

What also hit me was how incredibly modern some of the subject matter is. There is a lead character suffering from shell shock who is presented via his own first person psychology! - It is at times harrowing and other times uplifting (especially the scene with the hat!!!) - always convincing.