Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction by Nadia Fusini [Hardcover]

 

Mrs. Dallowaychronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway–a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925,Mrs. Dallowayis Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.

 

This edition uses the text of the original British publication ofMrs. Dalloway, which includes changes Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequent American editions.

“Perhaps her masterpiece...Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster

“Hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations felicitously experimenting with the English novel.” –Jorge Luis Borges

“Virginia Woolf is one of the few writers who changed life for all of us. Her combination of intellectual courage and painful emotional sensitivity created a new way of perceiving and living in the world.” –Margaret DrabbleVirginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biogralc.