Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf (1925).

I read this recently as part of an ongoing attempt to make up for the fact that I never took an English lit class. Though I’m sure I would have benefited from instruction by a professional (I would still today), I would never have appreciated this novel in my youth the way I do today, if only because of the way the world has changed in the intervening fifty years. Woolf (mostly) depicts a narrow slice of society (upper class London of the 1920s), yet her deep probe of the internal lives of her main characters allows us to experience an enlightening array of views of, reactions to, and lives based on that culture. While the consistently privileged positions of the main characters clearly informs their outlooks, the variety Woolf depicts is a useful antidote to recent tendencies to view the world through narrowly defined identities. The world has changed in the one-hundred years since Mrs. Dalloway was written, and again in the last fifty years, but one truth—that each individual’s views of the world are complex, multi-faceted and hard to pin down—has not.

I read a hard copy of this book.