Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, was first published in 1925. A work for which she felt she had ‘almost too many ideas’, it was easily her most ambitious experiment to date, both in terms of form and of psychological representation. After ‘a year’s groping’, she discovered what she called her ‘tunnelling process’, but which, as she put it, she told the past by instalments: ‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters…The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment…’. The resulting account of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway (and of the tragic suicide of her ‘double’, Septimus Warren Smith), remains, with To the Lighthouse (1927), one of Virginia Woolf’s two most widely read novels. In addition to Morris Beja’s introduction and notes, this edition provides a map of ‘The London of Mrs Dalloway’ and a frontispiece, reproducing a page from the corrected proofs. Virginia Woolf’s ‘Introduction’ to the 1928 Modern Library Edition of the novel appears as an appendix. The text here is that of the marked, corrected proofs for the first American edition. A list of variants compares: the copy text and the two first editions; a further set of corrected proofs which Virginia Woolf sent on Jacques Raverat; and a set of unmarked proofs.