WOOLFING # 23

MRS. DALLOWAY - 90

Mrs Dalloway was first published by Hogarth Press on this day in 1925.

"This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing."
--from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance - infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and Life - Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.