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Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
| List Price: |
$12.00 |
Unavailable for
purchase at this time |
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Paperback
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
Seventy years after its original publication, the impressive film adaption of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway will amaze and delight all readers being introduced to Clarissa Dalloway. Reprint. Movie tie-in."
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
| Customer Reviews: |
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| A classic, but not in the sense of being enjoyable |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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If you want to read a reader-hostile book about depressed people, Mrs. Dalloway is for you. Possibly conceived as a rebuttal to James Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway is readable in comparison and much shorter in length. However, it uses a "stream of consciousness" style and takes place over the course of one day. It's a day in which Mrs. Dalloway, a privileged housewife, is hosting a party, and the action follows her from her errand in the morning for the flowers until the guests leave at night.
The stream-of-consciousness style makes the book hard to get into. Mrs. Dalloway is not an educated woman and her thought process is more random than most. As her errands take her through the streets of London, the point of view floats from bystander to bystander and it's not clear whether these are characters or just random people.
Whether it's just on this day or every day, Mrs. Dalloway is thinking about her young adulthood, her close friend Sally and Peter, the man she might have married. She's distressed because her daughter Elizabeth is in the thrall of her history tutor, Miss Killman. Miss Killman is an unattractive, bitter university graduate who has embraced religion as an outlet for her emotions. Peter, the man from Mrs. Dalloway's past, has just returned from India and drops in on her during her party preparations. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked (that's WWI-speak for post-traumatic stress disorder, though this guy is mentally ill) soldier is visiting a specialist in nervous complaints. While Mrs. Dalloway is milling around London running her errands, taking pleasure in the hustle and bustle of London, the soldier and his wife are walking the same streets, and he is overwhelmed and assaulted by it all.
Mrs. Dalloway is a "classic", by which I think they mean "period piece", not "a book that will always be enjoyed". It's an interesting window into a different time, but not worth a read for pleasure.
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| I don't get it! |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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Being a lover of the classics I decided that I must read at least one Virginia Woolf book. Perhaps I picked the wrong book. I was bored. I do not understand why it is a classic. I will not be reading any other VW books.
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| This Method Needs Evolution |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Oh Virginia, Virginia how I admire your skill and abhor your method. Convention is at times an awful thing and capturing the spirit and soul in a novel is a lofty ambition. You are well equipped for the task. Writing about life as it is, and therefore writing about life as it happens in the mind, and employing the plot as a stimulant for your characters and not vica versa, is a clever move. Your stream of consciousness style does what you wanted it to: it maps out the characters' minds and takes us on a trip where we stop at each association and then are swept away by the next one.
However, this makes the novel hard to follow and the pattern you use is not strong enough to make up for the messiness of life as it appears on paper. Sure life is disjointed but writing should be clear and focused. Having to flip back and forth between pages to wonder how I got from here to there made me frustrated and losing my place because of this made the reading exponentially more disjointed. The writing does not need to mirror the internal state of the characters to such a dizzying extent in order to convey their inherent thoughts and feelings. If I were trying to show that the character was bored, I wouldn't make the reader bored, which is why you shouldn't heap all this rhythmic chaos on me because that's what's going on in Clarissa's head. I can understand the ping-pong game going on inside of my head because it's mine, I understand it, and I've known it forever. That said, Clarissa's mind is foreign to me and I don't know where these associations came from , why they are there, and why I should be interested in them at all. I did not enjoy reading this and I don't just read novels so I can dissect them. There has to be an element of entertainment and some kind of significance to the plot. It should not just serve as a backdrop to showcase a group of rich old men and women and a party they are all going to attend. But, this work was still amazing and the technical skill involved in assembling it a ginormous feat.
Virginia Woolf is an excellent writer, but I think think stream of consciousness style can be improved to be more palatable. I give her four stars for her genius and magic with words alone. Some authors overshadow their characters with the plot, others shine the spotlight on the characters and leave the plot hanging in the dark. She is a member of this give and take club- a slave to the other side of universal convention. But she is undeniably a master of the English written language. Nobody could put something so impossible together.
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| Stream of Conciousness not my cup of tea... |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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I didn't really enjoy this book, mostly I think due to the writing style. I found it to be a really slow read and hard to follow.
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| being in someones head |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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the story is always told from the view of being in someones head listining to there thoughts. it's rather novel and gives the reader the oppertunity to understand the characters better than they understand themselves.
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