Mrs Dalloway

’For there she was.’

Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in London, in June 1923, as she prepares for a party. Clarissa’s thoughts and actions are interwoven with the trauma and bereavement of Septimus Smith, a poor young man suffering from shell-shock, in a contrasting narrative that provides poignant insights into the political, historical, and social issues of Woolf’s day. The novel brings memories and the present together, written and set in the uneasy years immediately after the First World War.

This new edition, annotated and introduced by Trudi Tate, broadens and deepens key aspects of the historical context, including a fresh examination of Woolf’s representations of women in the wake of the first women in Britain winning the right to vote, the context of post-war politics, and the innovative aspects of the author’s writing style.

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Virginia Woolf

Trudi Tate is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Cambridge Faculty of English. She specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, with a particular interest in Virginia Woolf. Her books include Modernism, History and the First World War (2013), A Short History of the Crimean War (2019), The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (ed. with Kate Kennedy, 2013), and Women’s Fiction and the Great War (ed. with Suzanne Raitt, 1997). She is director of Literature Cambridge, which runs regular courses and a summer school on Woolf.