Mrs. Dalloway
1925
It opens on a June morning in 1920s London. Clarissa Dalloway walks through Bond Street to buy flowers for her party tonight. She is fifty-one, married to a distinguished MP, hostess to London's elite. But beneath the careful arrangements lies a life fully lived and partly wasted, the years with Sally Seton, the choice between Peter Walsh and her husband Richard, the daughter who died, the self she set aside for duty and decorum. Woolf weaves between Clarissa's polished surfaces and her interior torrents, between the present moment and fifty years of memory. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, Septimus Smith, young, shell-shocked, recently married, sits in a park with his wife Lucrezia, his mind fractured by war he cannot stop seeing. Their paths will cross. Their fates will collide with a force that cracks open everything Woolf has been building. This is a novel about the distance between who we are and who we perform, about time moving through us and within us, about what it means to be alive in a world still reeling from its own violence. It will break you. It will stay with you forever.
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“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.””
— Virginia Woolf
“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.””
— Virginia Woolf
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?””
— Virginia Woolf
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.””
— Virginia Woolf
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence””
— Virginia Woolf
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?””
— Virginia Woolf
“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.””
— Virginia Woolf
“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.””
— Virginia Woolf
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.””
— Virginia Woolf
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Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Lex, lex-books.com/book/mrs-dalloway-3492f0a9-e974-4a3f-a259-f281ca296a95.Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mrs-dalloway-3492f0a9-e974-4a3f-a259-f281ca296a95Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/mrs-dalloway-3492f0a9-e974-4a3f-a259-f281ca296a95.
