MRS DALLOWAY (VINTAGE CLASSICS WOOLF SERIES)

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her fathers death in 1904 Virginia and her sister the painter Vanessa Bell moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of śThe Bloomsbury Group. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentiethcentury British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf a writer and social reformer. Three years later her first novel The Voyage Out was published followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacobs Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism short fiction journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941 a few months before the publication of her final novel Between the Acts Virginia Woolf committed suicide.In this vivid portrait of one day in a womans life Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the lastminute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and reexamines the choices she has made over the course of her life.Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful complex incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving revolutionary artworks of the twentieth centuryA beautiful piece of writingI think To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway are sheer magicVirginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials preparations for a genteel party a day on a bourgeois family holiday they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call consciousness.