Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Summary Information
Author: Virginia WoolfEditor: Mark Hussey
Introduction: Bonnie Kime Scott
Draft Writer: Random House UK
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-01
ISBN: 0156030357
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
Book Review: A League of Her Own
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a fine edition and value, including a helpful preface introducing the author and novel as well as an appendix (the "annotated" part) with explanations of terms, places, and designations for non-Londoners along with identifications of literary, political and historical allusions for readers who could use a little extra help.
Anyone who has read James Joyce's "The Dead" will recognize some of the same themes and preoccupations in "Mrs. Dalloway," which in addition evokes numerous English "comedies of manners" as well as satirical narratives about a straight-laced Victorian culture that has become an anachronism in the 1920s. The story at times resembles a Jane Austen novel, except for the absence of a "fixed" point-of-view or reliable standard by which to measure the characters, each of which has, to lesser or greater degrees, sympathetic and unsympathetic qualities and is shown from the "inside" as a mind-in-process, a consciousness-in-flux (consequently, a reader needs to be careful not to apply an overly "logical" approach, insistent upon hanging on to a single point or statement as "the truth" about a character, who is more likely to try one possibility, then another, leaving it up to the reader to infer a character's essence through careful consideration of the important meanings derived from multiple impressions).
This is not a novel for the impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, next loud, and never to be trusted to be without irony.
Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love.
Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is, despite Woolf's limiting her story to a single day (compared to Cunningham's three-generation setting), the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the earth to move from under a reader's feet: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures the world whole not to mention the life of language itself.
The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. At that moment, one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as "existential" cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls.
Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it inevitably pales alongside the vibrant novel and microcosm of life that is its source and inspiration. Virginia, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.
Summary of Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
Harcourt is proud to introduce new annotated editions of three Virginia Woolf classics, ideal for the college classroom and beyond. For the first time, students reading these books will have the resources at hand to help them understand the text as well as the reasons and methods behind Woolf's writing. We've commissioned the best-known Woolf scholars in the field to provide invaluable introductions, editing, critical analysis, and suggestions for further reading. These much-awaited volumes are the first of many annotated Woolf editions Harcourt plans on publishing in the coming years.
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening,Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more; for it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.
Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Scott
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening,Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more; for it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives Mrs. Dalloway its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.
Annotated and with an introduction by Bonnie Scott
As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.
As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland
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