Rent Mrs. Dalloway

Synopsis

Influenced by Joyce’s ULYSSES, Virginia Woolf’s novel takes place within a 24-hour period and includes a stroll through the London streets that resembles Leopold Bloom’s walk around Dublin. Woolf’s narrative is structured out of the internal thoughts of characters Septimus Smith, the young, shell-shocked World War I veteran, and Clarissa Dalloway, the apparently perfect hostess who is preparing for her party that evening. Woolf elevates the world of the everyday, in which errands are done and buses are waited for, to a sublime evocation of the vital texture of life. But the interior monologues of Clarissa and Septimus also reveal a society that is deeply fractured beneath its smooth fa'ade, and in which cruelty, madness, and death coexist with life’s civilized pleasures. MRS. DALLOWAY is both brilliant and moving, and, with it, Woolf transformed the novel-of-manners into a work of profound psychological insights.

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