Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read “The Safekeep,” by Yael van der Wouden. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on “Playworld,” “We Do Not Part” and “Orbital.”)
It’s a beloved opening line from a beloved book: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.”
The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That’s pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa’s roving thoughts. Over the course of just a few hours, we see her grapple with social pressures, love, family, the trauma of war and more. The result is a groundbreaking portrayal of consciousness and a poetic look at what it means to be alive.
This year, the novel turns 100 years old.
To celebrate the book’s centennial, in June, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf. We’ll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on June 27, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by June 19, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get you started.
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Our original 1925 review of “Mrs. Dalloway”: “Mrs. Woolf is eminently among those who ‘kindle and illuminate.’ Mrs. Woolf has set free a new clarity of thought and rendered possible a more precise and more evocative agglutination of complicated ideas in simplicity of expression.” Read the full review here.
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This essay by the author Michael Cunningham (whose book “The Hours” is a riff on “Mrs. Dalloway”) about Virginia Woolf’s literary revolution: “Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA.” Read the full essay here.
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The writer Ben Libman’s essay, “Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?”, in which he discusses Virginia Woolf and a host of other modernist writers: “She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and later, in a more extreme sense, in ‘The Waves’ (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo.” Read the full essay here.
We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
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