Mrs. Dalloway

Published 1925

Mrs. Dalloway (published on May 14, 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf detailing a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. It is one of Woolf’s best-known novels.

     Created from two short stories, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and the unfinished “The Prime Minister,” the novel addresses Clarissa’s preparations for a party she will host in the evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and backward in time, in and out of the characters’ minds to construct an image of Clarissa’s life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005 Mrs. Dalloway was included on TIME Magazine's list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels written since 1923.

     In Mrs. Dalloway, the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

     Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs. Dalloway while still working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University called “Character in Fiction,” revised and retitled later the same year as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”