In the Library
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, 1925
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 63k words
£1.99
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Mrs Dalloway
A book whose reputation for difficulty almost entirely vanishes once you stop hunting for the plot and simply let the narration carry you from one person’s thoughts into another’s.
The reputation tells you that Mrs Dalloway is one of those experimental novels where nothing happens and you can never tell what is going on, the sort of book you are supposed to find baffling and pretend to admire. That picture gets the difficulty roughly right and the experience almost entirely wrong. What is actually here is a warm, gossipy, intensely alive day in the life of a city, following a society hostess as she walks across London to buy flowers and prepare for a party that evening, with her whole past flooding back into her as she goes. The sentences are gorgeous and the feeling is close to the skin, and far more happens inside this short book than the surface ever lets on.
If you like this, try
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Woolf refines the same technique: time dilates, a day holds a life, and loss is everywhere.
£1.99
Ulysses
James Joyce
Joyce did the same one-day experiment in Dublin, but Woolf keeps what he discards: gentleness.
£1.99
The Waves
Virginia Woolf
Woolf pushes the same single-day, stream-of-consciousness method further, but scatters it across six overlapping voices instead of following one woman through London.
£1.99
About the book
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, and with that sentence the whole of London opens like a flung-back window: a June morning after the war, Big Ben booming the hours into the air, a single ordinary day stretched wide enough to hold an entire life. Clarissa is giving a party tonight. But the prose refuses to stay with her, slipping from mind to mind across the city, into the thoughts of an old lover, a passing stranger, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked young veteran who hears the dead singing in Regent's Park and can no longer bear the weight of being alive. Woolf finds the deepest things in the smallest gestures, the way a whole life can turn on a kiss remembered for thirty years. When word of a death reaches the lit, crowded party, you understand what the shimmering day has been building toward, and why ordinary happiness can suddenly feel like grace.