The authorized, original edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece and
one of the most "moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth
century" (Michael Cunningham), with a foreword by Maureen Howard.
In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life, Mrs. Clarissa
Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for
a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect
society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she
is flooded with remembrances of the past--the passionate loves of her
carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and
retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa
reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead
to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered
from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the
characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary
life and reshaped English literature as we know it.
"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