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- Paperback: 194 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 0.51 x 7.97 x 5.34
- Publisher: Harvest Books; ;
(October 1990)
- ISBN: 0156628708
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Book
Description
Clarissa
Dalloway, in her fifties, wife of an English MP, emerges from
her house in Westminster one fine June morning to buy flowers
for her party. And by that simple act she entwines her life with
the lives of others who will hear, with her, Big Ben toll away
the hours of their destinies that day.
"Clarissa's day 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 a civilization." (The New York
Times)
As Clarissa
Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a
sky-writing plane captures her attention.
Crowds stare
upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops,
leaving off one letter, picking up another.
Like the
airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter
Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth,
the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus
Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.
As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that
evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her
husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who,
Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing
luncheons).
Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to
criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories
of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful
friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf then explores the relationships between women and
men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was
something central which permeated; something warm which broke up
surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of
women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally
Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?"
While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with
Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith
catapults desperately into his delusions.
Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web,
they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these
characters draw tighter as evening deepens.
As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf
offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the
present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie
Kervran Stangeland
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