Mrs Dalloway

Bold and experimental, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better and better with every reading.

On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway - fashionable, worldly, wealthy and an accomplished hostess - sets off to buy flowers for the party she will host that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked survivor of the Great War, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness.

Parties and Passions, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Great Gatsby are also available in this Macmillan Collector’s Library series of gorgeous paperbacks featuring the greatest parties and the wildest passions in literature.

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen. She was educated at home with her sister, Vanessa, in a literary environment. The death of Woolf’s mother in 1895 and her father in 1904 led to the first of the serious nervous breakdowns that would come to feature heavily in her life. Shortly afterwards she moved with her sister and two of her brothers to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she would later establish the Hogarth Press, and also published her first novel, The Voyage Out. It would be followed by eight others, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), which together establish her position as one of the most important modernists of the twentieth century. Woolf took her own life in 1941.