Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Summary Information
Author: Virginia WoolfEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-10-28
ISBN: 0151009988
Number of pages: 216
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Book Reviews of Mrs. Dalloway
Book Review: A classic, but not in the sense of being enjoyable
Summary: 2 Stars
If you want to read a reader-hostile book about depressed people, Mrs. Dalloway is for you. Possibly conceived as a rebuttal to James Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway is readable in comparison and much shorter in length. However, it uses a "stream of consciousness" style and takes place over the course of one day. It's a day in which Mrs. Dalloway, a privileged housewife, is hosting a party, and the action follows her from her errand in the morning for the flowers until the guests leave at night.
The stream-of-consciousness style makes the book hard to get into. Mrs. Dalloway is not an educated woman and her thought process is more random than most. As her errands take her through the streets of London, the point of view floats from bystander to bystander and it's not clear whether these are characters or just random people.
Whether it's just on this day or every day, Mrs. Dalloway is thinking about her young adulthood, her close friend Sally and Peter, the man she might have married. She's distressed because her daughter Elizabeth is in the thrall of her history tutor, Miss Killman. Miss Killman is an unattractive, bitter university graduate who has embraced religion as an outlet for her emotions. Peter, the man from Mrs. Dalloway's past, has just returned from India and drops in on her during her party preparations. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked (that's WWI-speak for post-traumatic stress disorder, though this guy is mentally ill) soldier is visiting a specialist in nervous complaints. While Mrs. Dalloway is milling around London running her errands, taking pleasure in the hustle and bustle of London, the soldier and his wife are walking the same streets, and he is overwhelmed and assaulted by it all.
Mrs. Dalloway is a "classic", by which I think they mean "period piece", not "a book that will always be enjoyed". It's an interesting window into a different time, but not worth a read for pleasure.
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