Cover of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

3.7 · 53 ratings on Open Library

As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a glorious June day, her movements bring together a cast of friends and strangers, each in turn weighing matters of mind and heart.

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Length
64,000 words
Reading time
About 4 hours
Format
EPUB, DRM-free

About the book

Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades.

This is a novel to read and cherish, if only to marvel at Woolf’s linguistic acrobatics. Words and phrases swoop and soar like swallows. Woolf’s sentences are magnificent: sinuous, whirling, impeccably detailed. As narrative perspective shifts from character to character—sometimes within a single sentence—readers come to understand the oh-so-permeable barrier between self and other. Through Clarissa we meet Septimus Warren Smith, his wife Rezia, and a cast of dozens more, all connected by the “leaden circles” of Big Ben marking the passage of every hour, by the pavements of Bloomsbury that lead everywhere and nowhere. Modernist London has never been portrayed more sublimely: replete with birdsong and flowers, resplendent in sunshine, youthful yet eternal—and even in the aftermath of war and pandemic, resilient.

This is the Standard Ebooks edition, carefully proofread and typeset, with a table of contents and linked footnotes.

What readers think

3.7 out of 5

53 ratings of Mrs. Dalloway from Open Library readers, as of 10th Nov.

  • 5 stars25%
  • 4 stars36%
  • 3 stars28%
  • 2 stars9%
  • 1 star2%