New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1925).
Octavo, 14 x19.5 cm. 296pp.
First US edition, one of 2100 copies. Original orange cloth, printed paper label on the spine.
Spine darkened; spine ends a bit worn; paper label darkened and stained. Cloth lightly rubbed and soiled, corners with light wear. Very good condition. Kirkpatrick A9b.
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Virginia Woolf is a true 20th century icon. Along with James
Joyce and a handful of others she helped pioneer many of the trademark
innovations of modernist literature. Mrs. Dalloway is emblematic
of her novels; it is also one of her greatest. The novel follows in intricate
detail one day in the inner life of Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a British
M.P., as she prepares to give an evening party. As her day progresses
the reader is drawn into the intricate web of relationships, obligations,
and memories that enfold Clarissa'a life, and is made to feel the powerful
emotions that loom behind even the simplest events in her day. In the
past few years, Mrs. Dalloway has enjoyed something of a renaissance
in popularity, no doubt due to the 1998 film starring Vanessa Redgrave
and last year's Pulitzer
Prize winning novel, The Hours, which is loosely based on Woolf's
1925 novel.
"Mrs. Dalloway captures in a definite matrix the drift of thought
and feeling in a period, the point of view of a class, and seems almost
to indicate the strength and weakness of an entire civilization."
The New York Times
"Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and
must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experiments
that have completely broken with tradition." The New York Times
