Penguin Select Classics: Mrs. Dalloway: (Original, Unabridged Classic)
"With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes — one of the tragedies of married life." Most days offer nothing dramatic. No grand revelations, no turning points. Just the ordinary business of getting through. And yet, as Virginia Woolf understood better than almost anyone, it's precisely within those unremarkable hours that the most profound inner lives play out. Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway across a single London day, and what a quietly devastating day it is. She presents the composed, capable face of a dutiful wife, while beneath the surface, memories and long-buried feelings keep pushing through. A chance meeting with a former lover, flowers arriving unexpectedly from her husband — small things, really, yet each one tugs at something she'd rather keep still. Every domestic gesture becomes a moment of reckoning. Woolf's prose rewards patience. Sentences drift and double back, mimicking the way the mind actually moves through time, sliding between past and present without warning. It can feel disorienting at first, but stick with it and you'll find it oddly faithful to lived experience. Widely regarded as Woolf's finest work, this is a novel about the hidden weight of ordinary choices, and the quiet grief of roads not taken. It leaves you wondering, in the best possible way, how much of your own life passes unexamined.
- Author: Virginia Woolf
- Publisher: Penguin Select Classics
- Genre: Short Stories
- ISBN: 978-9815204483
- Pages: 180 pages