Queen of blah blah blah. 1920s, England. Wealthy fifty-one years old Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway walks the streets of London city and thinks about hosting one of her famed parties. Many socialites and part of the English high society are expected to attend. Peter Walsh, an old flame from the past, also arrives.Man I HATED this with all my heart! This was two hundred pages of continuous ramblings, without any kind of discernible transition whatsoever! In a way it reminded me of that insufferable Fau...

Is this amazing book the archetype for present-day feminine TV Soap Operas..?If you said that, I, and so many others who’ve been utterly charmed by Virginia Woolf’s disarmingly ‘unrehearsed’ slice-of-life prose in this incredible book, would take bitter umbrage!No, this little book is MUCH more than that...It’s a radiant hymn to the power of momentary, personal Epiphanies in our rapidly-moving, seemingly impersonal, and largely unconscious lives.You know those magical Chicken-Soup-for-The-Soul m...

"What does the brain matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?” Mrs. Dalloway ~~~ Virginia WoolfI didn't realize this until the final page, but at its heart, MRS. DALLOWAY is a love story. I absolutely loved this book. Mrs. Dalloway is a complex, compelling novel. It is wrongly described as a portrait of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway; this is not correct. Mrs. Dalloway is the hub that connects the spokes, the characters of Woolf's novel, but there is no main...

[Revised, pictures add 4/24/22]Virginia Woolf set out to write an unconventional novel and succeeded, although since she wrote, we have read so many unconventional novels that it seems tame. In her introduction to the edition I read, Maureen Howard writes: “If ever there was a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously modern novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf may have been influenced by Ulysses because all the action occurs in one day. Church bells mark significant even...

“So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away...

‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.’Our lives are an elaborate and exquisite collage of moments. Each moment beautiful and powerful on their own when reflected upon, turned about and examined to breath in the full nostalgia for each glorious moment gone by, yet it is the compendium of moments that truly form our history of individuality. Yet, what is an expression of individuality if it is not taken in relation to all the lives around us, as a moment in history, a drop in a multitud...

Experiencing Mrs. Dalloway is like being a piece of luggage on an airport conveyor belt, traversing lazily through a crowd of passengers, over and around and back again, but with the added bonus of being able to read people’s thoughts as they pass; this one checking his flight schedule, that one arguing with his wife, the one over there struggling with her cart, bumping into those arguing and checking. For the most part, the ride is smooth as Woolf transitions from one consciousness to another. ...

While reading her works, I get the impression that Virginia Woolf knows everything about people and that she understands life better than anyone, ever. Is there a single hidden feeling or uncommon perspective with which she is not intimately acquainted? And does anyone else draw forth these feelings and perspectives with more grace and empathy, and impart them to us in such a lush, inimitable fashion? Perhaps. But you’d never think that while immersed in her exquisite, adult dramas. In Mrs. Dall...

shoutout to virginia woolf for doing the lord's work (writing short books that make you look smart).

this is a great interesting beautifully written compelling makes-you-think type book that usually has a gorgeous cover and can be read over the course of one lazy afternoon.

no notes!

bottom line: thank you, virginia.

What a lark! What a plunge! There is a famous episode in the first section of Mrs Dalloway where a sky-writing aeroplane flies over London, soaring, spinning and plunging, writing in white letters of steam on a radiant sheet of blue sky. The onlookers on the ground, strolling down Regent’s Park and Oxford Street, try to decipher the signs above. “Blaxo? Kreemo? Toffee?” Whatever it is, this image is exceptionally profound, for it reflects the very novel we are reading. Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway u...