All-TIME 100 Novels

Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa Dalloway is the kind of woman you would pass on the street without a thought, or would if you lived in London in 1923: middle-aged, upper-middle-class, well-married and well-fed. But Woolf draws aside the veil of her placid exterior to reveal the dreams, fears, foibles, passion and pain that swirl endlessly just beneath it. Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa through the course of a single day, and as she goes about her errands, preparing for a party she’s giving that night, we drift and rock on the ebb and flow of her lost love for an old flame who resurfaces unexpectedly; her never-consummated lesbian longing for a childhood friend; and her endless yearning for some firm sense of what, in the swirling detritus and ephemera that make up daily life, is true and good and permanent.

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