Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman in post-World War I England, walks through London on a fine June morning after the famous first line–“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” We follow Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for that evening’s party and although the plot takes place over the course of only one day, the thoughts, dreams, emotions, and memories of the characters cover a lifetime of choices and experiences. Clarissa is the main character, of course, but the narration weaves in and out of her story, spending […]
20th Century Dalloways
This short novel, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, deals with a circle of women who married and had children in the ’50s somewhere in New England. Much of their story is told in flashbacks from a point in the 1990s, when they have aged and have lost many of those who had been close. As a result, we get nothing like a linear narrative, and that’s not terribly important. The relationships that these women form, the choices they have made, and how […]
Mrs. Dalloway
I’m on a quest this year to read 50 books by 50 women writers (in honor of my impending 50th birthday and #ReadWomen2014), and as I’ve never read anything by Virginia Woolf, this felt like the right time to get to it. Mrs. Dalloway is a short novel by Woolf that covers the span of one day, marked by the hourly tolling of the bells. I would characterize it as having stream-of-consciousness narration, with the narrators switching from one to the next as they encounter […]