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Sep 28, 2011

Bram rated it:

While reading her works, I get the impression that Virginia Woolf knows everything about people and that she understands life better than anyone, ever. Is there a single hidden feeling or uncommon perspective with which she is not intimately acquainted? And does anyone else draw forth these feelings and perspectives with more grace and empathy, and impart them to us in such a lush, inimitable fashion? Perhaps. But you’d never think that while immersed in her exquisite, adult dramas. In Mrs. More...

30 comments like (56 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2010

Ceridwen rated it:

This is a hard book to write about, for me. I read this on planes, and not on foot, in hard tubes that bolt up into the blue and down again into the strange sameness of airports; surrounded by strangers and boredom; trying to mask my weeping, coughing back my laughter; the phones off; the world insubstantial and patchy out the window of the plane. Wrong. I should have been walking, but then maybe flying is the better metaphor for Woolf's strange prose, her perfect movement. At the end, wrung out More...

62 comments like (64 people liked it)

Sep 29, 2007

Jessica rated it:

Okay, so this is very fabulous novel and in my opinion one of the Greatest, despite the fact that for me it was not exactly a breeze to get through. I mean, it wasn't painful or anything, but nor was it one I just sat down and plowed through like a maniac until I was through. I carried the thing around with me for awhile and poked at it in fits and starts over a period of time. I think Virginia Woolf is a genius, but there's something kind of inaccessible about her to me, maybe because I'm not a More...

20 comments like (35 people liked it)

Jul 28, 2010

Jennifer (aka EM) rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

21 comments like (17 people liked it)

Mar 09, 2010

Elizabeth rated it:

I went for a walk in Central Park yesterday and then finished Mrs. Dalloway. Walking is mandatory for reading this book. It must be in done in a city, London is best but any will do, so long as you can hear the traffic and observe the other people on the street and wonder about what they do and why they’re also walking and observe what they observe. I love walking in cities. It is almost the only thing I do on vacation. Walking in a new city is like nothing else. Everything seems new. Everything More...

43 comments like (48 people liked it)

Mar 05, 2010

yoli rated it:

My reasoning for reading this book are three-fold:
- I'd tried once and gotten about 3/4 of the way through, but never finished
- It is by Virginia Woolf, who was discussed in Ursula LeGuin's Steering the Craft, a book about writing, as an example of great use of sentence length and complex syntax
- Woolf's A Room of One's Own was discussed in my literary theory class as one of the seminal books of Feminist theory, and Mrs. Dalloway is very much a women's novel focusing in on a si More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 15, 2009

Christina rated it:

Although Mrs. Dalloway was my first foray into Woolf's fiction (I had only read her essay collections A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas), it did not take long for me to become utterly enthralled with this novel. The experience of reading Mrs. Dalloway is similar to viewing an impressionistic painting—just as the eye flits over images, shadows, and suggestions of objects in a Monet or a Degas piece, a reader engrossed in Mrs. Dalloway will find that the language carries you along as Woolf dep More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Apr 02, 2010

Kelly rated it:

Virginia Woolf made me feel like a drunken gardener, a diver on the verge of the bends, a foot stamping child, a foal tripping over its own legs trying desperately to get to its mother. And you know, I really don’t like feeling like any of these things. What is worse, she set up a buffet of champagne, mimosas, fruit and jam, white table cloths fluttering on a patio in the sunshine and light breezes, let me settle myself down to watch a perfectly civilized game of tennis between old pals from E More...

55 comments like (38 people liked it)

Aug 20, 2010

Ellen rated it:

Perhaps being a visual learner/thinker is just shorthand for being an aural idiot, but Ansel Adams' photograph captures how I see Mrs. Dalloway:

When I was reading the book, I kept thinking of splintered glass. What Virginia Woolf does so deftly here is move you from the mind of one character into the thoughts of another. There’s no discernible transition, and yet, as she focuses on another character it’s as though the light shifts slightly and a different shard is i More...

42 comments like (23 people liked it)

Apr 28, 2008

Jason rated it:

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not I think they deserve the label

Book #15: Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925)

The story in a nutshell:
For those who don't know, mos More...

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Apr 04, 2008

Martine rated it:

I feel odd reviewing Mrs Dalloway just days after writing a lecture-length review of The Hours, which touches upon much the same themes. Yet I think I'll give it a try.

Mrs Dalloway portrays a day in the lives of various people living in London in 1923. At the heart of the novel is Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran who is suffering from shell shock and schizophrenia. Septimus' descent into madness (clearly modelled on Virginia Woolf's own) and relationship with his spouse are juxt More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 24, 2008

Amy rated it:

Although I only gave Mrs. Dalloway two stars, I should clarify that that represents quite a gain, because I have long despised this book. When I read it as an undergraduate, my 19 year-old-self found it self-indulgent, overly emotional, and extremely tedious. My 36 year-old-self, I was pleased to discover, is slightly more tolerant and more patient than its younger version. So while I will never truly be a fan of Virginia Woolf--or, for that matter, Modernist Novels in general (excepting More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Nov 13, 2010

umberto rated it:

I bought this second-hand book absent-mindedly somewhere I can't recall at the moment, I mean I was a bit vague and not sure if I could read it all. However, I kept reading on and on; now I confess it's not an easy one, you need your imagination as well as your familiarity with her famous 'stream of consciousness'.

One reason, I think, is that Virginia Woolf's writing style is unique, second to none, especially her fabulous choice of words. For example: Such were his rattles, his baub More...

18 comments like (6 people liked it)

Apr 28, 2011

Troy rated it:

A match burning in a crocus

On the back cover, my Penguin Classics paperback edition of this book quotes from the “New Yorker”;

“The book’s celebrated stream of consciousness is one of the few genuine innovations in the history of the novel.”

This seems an odd choice of statement to de-contextualise and present as being representative of “Mrs Dalloway”; for as true as its sensationalism may or may not be, the heartbreak and devastation Woolf’s grea More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2012

Lazarus rated it:

With an unhurried ease the River Ouse idles through the Sussex hillsides meandering its way to join that stretch of sea which has successfully kept the English geographically aloof from their Continental cousins since before Domesday, even finding time en route for a spot of landscape gardening and to make a number of unscheduled social calls.

It was into this river that on an otherwise uneventful but, nonetheless, unforgiving Spring day during wartime, and having filled her pockets f More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Dec 01, 2008

Choupette rated it:

I loved this book, but not quite as much as I was hoping. The stream of consciousness style Woolf uses is brilliantly expressive and I was constantly surprised by how clearly she used it to portray character. The likenening of her style to that of the cinema (panning from character to character, moving in for a close-up, then moving on; as well as the use of techniques such as flashbacks and montages) mentioned in the introduction struck me as very apt. Clarissa Dalloway's dauntless vivacity and More...

3 comments like (7 people liked it)

Mar 20, 2008

Jess rated it:

Mrs. Dalloway is not by title alone enough to intrigue me - it was the movie The Hours that even made me want to look at anything by Virginia Woolf. I had seen the movie, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' but that didn't really do it for me either. After the Hours, I picked up the book, and it promptly sat on my shelf after a half-baked attempt to read it ended within the first few pages.

Its flow, the rhythm, threw me off at first. My brain is easily distracted, and the book's prose More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 17, 2009

Saman added it

خانم دالوي گفت خودش گلها را مي‌خرد
براي اين كه لوسي ترتيب بقيه‌ي كارها را مي‌داد. درها را از چارچوب‌ها بيرون مي‌آوردند؛ قرار بود كارگرهاي رامپلبري بيايند. كلاريسا دالاوي فكر كرد از اين گذشته عجب صبحي است - آنقدر تر و تازه است كه انگار آن را در ساحل براي بچه‌ها نقاشي كرده‌اند

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بين خوانندگان پر و پاقرص و علاقه‌مند به آثار ويرجينياوولف و منتقدان بر سر اين كه در بين سه كتاب: به سوي فانوس دريايي، خانم دالوي و موج‌ها كدام يك اثر برتر اين نويسنده ا More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2007

Michael rated it:

I've got to hand it to the English teachers, they sure know how to pick 'em. An unprecedented 5 consecutive novels with no plot. This one's just as boring as Devil on the Cross and just as Cryptic as Zamyatin's We.

Some may praise the stream of consciousness as brilliant and innovative but it really just makes the text as undesirable of a read as possible. All of the characters are hypocritical and bland, and develop absolutely no sympathy. There is absolutely no plot, for a book tha More...

11 comments like (14 people liked it)

Feb 28, 2010

Manifest rated it:

to begin, i found this to be a book that resists reading on almost every page. it took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening; all of a sudden, the transitions from character to character (and clock to clock) became clear. i definitely see the influence of proust (the aquatic / marine metaphors used to describe people, as proust used describing the inhabitants of balbec). i still don't understand woolf's animosity towards joyce ... ? would anyone care to explain?

prousti More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 19, 2010

Faith-Anne rated it:

This is my favorite book. It took me forever to get into Woolf's style, but once I did I fell in love. Every sentence is a work of art. Every paragraph's a poem. It's heart breaking & joyous & so full of life. "Mrs. Dalloway" deserves your full attention when reading it, but it's well worth it! Breathtaking.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jun 23, 2011

Amber rated it:

*afterthought: I know this review reeks of "I just took a class in early British Modernism", which is partly because I did - but honestly, these thoughts are my own. Have no clue if my prof would agree with what I've said (luckily, he's not on Goodreads). So perhaps I fail on two counts. Anyway.

This novella finally brought me to a deep appreciation of Woolf's prose. As my English professor phrased it, "the narration is like a monkey with a video camera, jumping onto th More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 05, 2010

Eric rated it:

Virginia Woolf and the semicolon! The strung-bead style of Mrs. Dalloway is an amazing achievement—the sentences so flexible, expandable, following perfectly the contours of the characters’ subjectivities. Clarissa hates Miss Kilman in a passage that piles up negatives, accretes disgusts, gropes for reasons in the just the style of someone inveighing against a shadow in conversation, in a personal letter (the novel, with Clarissa and Peter trying to sort out their feelings for one another, at ti More...

12 comments like (18 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2011

Chiara rated it:

Una giornata nella vita di Clarissa Dalloway, che questa sera darà una festa. L’orologio rintocca le ore della sua routine quotidiana: esce a comprare i fiori, sceglie il vestito da indossare, incontra un vecchio innamorato che non vedeva da anni, riflette sul rapporto col marito e con la figlia. La sua voce si sovrappone a quella di altri personaggi, che intrecciano anche solo marginalmente il suo cammino. Tra queste la più rilevante è quella di Warren Smith, un reduce di guerra che al termine More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2011

Margot rated it:

I can't remember how many times I have tried to write a review about "Mrs.Dalloway". I kept giving up every single time because I didn't know where to start. It's really difficult to write about Virginia Woolf's works in my opinion, first because she was such an amazing author and person. I sincerely admire her for so long now that I'm quite intimidated to write anything about her or any of her works. I have read "Mrs.Dalloway", "The Waves" but also some letters she More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

May 08, 2008

Jason rated it:

It's not often that a sentence or two from a book will tell you very much, but I think the following passage should tell you right away whether you will like this book.

Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Dec 06, 2007

Karl rated it:

Most astonishing this time round was the anticipation in Woolf of the not-yet-existing Frankfurt school. Famously (so far as I know: I'm boning up on it this summer), the Frankfurt school discovered links between rationalism, positivism, and state violence; WWI and, later, fascism were not (or at least not simply) negations of the Enlightenment, but part of the same. With that in mind, reread Walsh and Richard Dalloway and their civilized, cynical pose toward Empire and its great projects, rerea More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 08, 2007

Ajeya rated it:

May Favorite book by my Favorite author Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Dalloway is a story of one woman in a single day of her life. The novel opens with the first sentence - "Mrs. Dalloway said she shall buy the flowers herself." - Shows, so much of brightness, so much of hope, so much of possibility.

And then the lady walks past the Bond Street, London, and as she observes every thing that happens there, slowly the author shapes her character and her state of mind.
More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2007

Laura rated it:

Living up to the name Woolf assigned to the manuscript version - "The Hours," Mrs. Dalloway delves into the souls of several 1920s Londoners - each of varying socioeconomic backgrounds - in the course of one day. With Big Ben marking the time, the narrator follows Mrs. Dalloway as she plans a dinner party and encounters old friends, lovers, and memories. Not all these meetings are happy, however, and through the strangely prophetic character, Septimus Smith, the narrator offers gli More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

grant rated it:

I just finished the Hours after reading Ms. Dalloway, and while both are excellent books, I can't help but feel that there is something seriously wrong with the conclusions of the books.

The protagonist females in both books focus on singular events as the locus for happiness in life, a secret kiss and a moment by the sea, and the unimpeachable quality of those moment in youth, leads to self doubt and pining for what might have been; As the hours drip by, one a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

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