Mrs. Dalloway : Broadview Edition

Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in the middle of June 1923. Its plot is seemingly thin: a middle-aged society hostess is having a party; she hopes the Prime Minister will attend; she reconnects with old friends from her youth. From these slimmest of premises a whole world unfolds. Of all of Virginia Woolf's novels, it is Mrs. Dalloway that appears to speak most intimately to our own time. It has formed the basis of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998); of the Academy Award-winning 2002 film based on Cunningham's novel; and of the 1997 film, Mrs. Dalloway , starring Vanessa Redgrave. Mrs. Dalloway was Woolf's fourth novel and the first to fully realise the experimental, lyrical style with which she is now so firmly identified. But to some reviewers at the time of its publication, the novel's achievement in the making of its fictional world did not seem likely to prove lasting. Selected reviews, both positive and negative, are included in the appendices of this edition, as are materials on the literary, political, medical, and educational contexts of the novel.