It is hard to find anyone nowadays who will dare venture a bad word on
Mrs Dalloway: its status as a pioneer feminist text and a brilliantly
experimental work is wholly secure. At the time of its publication,
however, opinions were more mixed. It was hard in the mid-1920s to come
to terms with what, for many, seemed a vexatiously new-fangled work. Mrs
Dalloway is a novel which provokes thought about the fraught nature of
genius, literary modernism, the ambiguous place of women in English
society and literature, the infinite complexities of sexual
relationships, and even the worthwhileness of life itself.