Name: The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
Price: 31.56 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 9781631496769

Type

Physical Book

Author

Virginia Woolf

Merve Emre

Publisher

Liveright Publishing Corporation

Year

2021

Language

English

Pages

242

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

23.6 x 18.8 x 2.5 cm

Weight

0.84 kg.

ISBN13

9781631496769

Synopsis "The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway "

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." So begins Virginia Woolf's much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been viewed not only as Woolf's masterpiece, but as a pivotal work of literary modernism and one of the most significant and influential novels of the twentieth century. In this visually powerful annotated edition, acclaimed Oxford don and literary critic Merve Emre gives us an authoritative version of this landmark novel, supporting it with generous commentary that reveals Woolf's aesthetic and political ambitions--in Mrs. Dalloway and beyond--as never before. Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place over the course of a single day in late June, its plot centering on the upper-class Londoner Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to throw a party that evening for the nation's elite. But the novel is complicated by Woolf's satire of the English social system, and by her groundbreaking representation of consciousness. The events of the novel flow through the minds and thoughts of Clarissa and her former lover Peter Walsh and others in their circle, but also through shopkeepers and servants, among others. Together Woolf's characters--each a jumble of memories and perceptions--create a broad portrait of a city and society transformed by the Great War in ways subtle but profound ways. No figure has been more directly shaped by the conflict than the disturbed veteran Septimus Smith, who is plagued by hallucinations of a friend who died in battle, and who becomes the unexpected second hinge of the novel, alongside Clarissa, even though--in one of Woolf's many radical decisions--the two never meet.Emre's extensive introduction and annotations follow the evolution of Clarissa Dalloway--based on an apparently conventional but actually quite complex acquaintance of Woolf's--and Septimus Smith from earlier short stories and drafts of Mrs. Dalloway to their emergence into the distinctive forms devoted readers of the novel know so well. For Clarissa, Septimus, and her other creations, Woolf relied on the skill of "character reading," her technique for bridging the gap between life and fiction, reality and representation. As Emre writes, Woolf's "approach to representing character involved burrowing deep into the processes of consciousness, and, so submerged, illuminating the infinite variety of sensation and perception concealed therein. From these depths, she extracted an unlimited capacity for life." It is in Woolf's characters, fundamentally unknowable but fundamentally alive, that the enduring achievement of her art is most apparent. For decades, Woolf's rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, featuring 150 illustrations, draws on decades of Woolf scholarship as well as countless primary sources, including Woolf's private diaries and notes on writing. The result is not only a transporting edition of Mrs. Dalloway, but an essential volume for Woolf devotees and an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature.

Virginia Woolf

(Author)

View Author's Page

Virginia Woolf was born in London on January 25, 1882, and died on March 28, 1941, drowned in the River Ouse. After her father's death, the well-known man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia and her sister Vanessa left the elegant Kensington neighborhood and moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury, which named the brilliant literary group formed around the Stephen sisters. Among its members were T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackville-West, and the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married and with whom she ran the prestigious Hogarth Press. From her early works, Virginia Woolf highlighted her intention to take novels beyond mere narration. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), the author expressed the inner feelings of the characters with her own techniques, achieving great psychological effects through images, metaphors, and symbols. Her technique was consolidated with Orlando (1931) and The Waves (1931), which secured her an indisputable place within the finest world literature. Additionally, Woolf wrote essays as famous as A Room of One's Own (1929), which still inspires new generations of women today, literary criticism articles like those compiled in The Common Reader (1925, 1932) and in Genius and Ink (2021), or the biography of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett's dog, Flush (1933). All these works are published by Lumen.

See less