Novel
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925
Opening lines
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
On a June morning in London, a society woman goes out to buy the flowers for her evening party herself. Big Ben strikes the hours. A car stops in front of a shop window in Bond Street, an aeroplane traces letters of smoke in the sky, and the crowd looks up. In Regent's Park, a former soldier hears a dead comrade speak to him, while his young Italian wife waits for the time of the appointment with a great doctor in Harley Street. Their family doctor finds nothing wrong with him; the specialist, for his part, decides to send him to a nursing home in the country.
Context
The book was to have been called The Hours. Its author described her discovery in her diary in August 1923: digging out beautiful caves behind her characters, so that they communicate and all come out into the present; in October, she called this method her tunnelling process. In a preface written for an American edition of 1928, she revealed that the war veteran did not exist in the first version of the book, and that the heroine was to kill herself there, or perhaps only die when her party came to an end; this character was then meant to be her double. The book appeared in May 1925 from the press she ran with her husband, under a jacket designed by her sister.
Who it is for
A short novel, without chapters, in stream of consciousness; translated into French as early as 1929, then retranslated several times.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the cinema in 1997 by Marleen Gorris, with Vanessa Redgrave, it inspired Michael Cunningham's novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.