Search - Mrs. Dalloway

Spend a day experiencing the innermost thoughts, feelings, elations, and disappointments of a variety of people with intersecting lives. The day begins and ends in the 1920s with Clarissa Dalloway's party, and the people - past & present - that are important to her. It's a chance to experience what Woolf described as "the enormous within the everyday", but be prepared for a meandering journey. Pretty much plot-free, some parts are absolutely riveting, some parts are flat-out boring, but overall it's about delving within and mining the inconsistency of the human psyche for material.

In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation- fresh flower shopping, new dress buying, and festive room decorating- while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect sociaty hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times- the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical decision to marry her conservative, reasonable husband, the approach and retreat fo war's confusion. And, met with the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old. This revelatory and experimental novel melts together the past, the present, and visions of the future in each and every moment, revealing th personal and social nuances that give Mrs. Dalloway its memorable richness and depth. From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, tp a war-ravaged stranger in the park, each character exposes the daily events and the constant interactions that connect them with the rest of humanity. Heralded as Woolf's greatest work of fiction, Mrs. Dalloway is not only a thorough rendering of a vivid human life, it is the outline on paper of human conciousness.