Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Mrs. Dalloway

London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1925

Mrs. Dalloway was a groundbreaking achievement for Woolf. The novel, which unfolds on a single summer’s day around two separate narratives—that of Clarissa Dalloway, a London society matron preparing to host a party, and Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I—explores consciousness and life after the Great War. In a 1928 introduction to the book, Woolf revealed “that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party.”