Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway, is a novel by Virginia Woolf that was published in 1925. It narrates one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner in post-First World War England. Mrs. Dalloway is essentially a plotless book; the action takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. The book describes Clarissa’s preparations for a party she will host in that very evening. The story travels forwards and backwards in time in order to create an image of Clarissa’s life. In writing this novel, Woolf found her own, distinctive voice, which she refined even more in her following novels. Woolf, like many other Modernist authors of her time, felt that such a style did not truly depict life. She drew from both Joyce’s and Marcel Proust’s understanding of time and psychology to develop interesting, complete and strong characters which express the reality of their existence on the page.