Mrs Dalloway

Written in the same period as Mrs Dalloway these seven short stories show the author's fascination with parties and with all the excitement, the fluctuations of mood and temper and the heightened emotions which surround these social occasions. Mrs Dalloway's Party is enchanting piece of work by one of our most acclaimed twentieth-century writers.

Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in the middle of June 1923. Its plot is seemingly thin: a middle-aged society hostess is having a party; she hopes the Prime Minister will attend; she reconnects with old friends from her youth. From these slimmest of premises a whole world unfolds. Of all of Virginia Woolf’s novels, it is Mrs. Dalloway that appears to speak most intimately to our own time. Selected contemporary reviews, both positive and negative, are included in the appendices of this edition, as are materials on the literary, political, medical, and educational contexts of the novel.

“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

Unlock the more straightforward side of Mrs Dalloway with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a masterpiece of English modernist literature. In this stylistically daring work, we follow two different yet similar characters for one day, as they walk the streets of London in the interwar period. A vivid painting of human nature, the condition of women and the personal disasters wreaked by war, this novel has topped reading lists for decades. Woolf was a significant figure in literary society during her lifetime and believed that female writers should have their own money, a controversial opinion to hold at such a time. Her legacy has lived on ever since her tragic suicide, which ended her lifelong suffering with mental illness. Find out everything you need to know about Mrs Dalloway in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.

This anthology exhibits the diversity, inventiveness, and intellectual energy of the writings of J. Hillis Miller, the most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onward, Miller has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the practice and theory of literary criticism, the ethics and responsibilities of teaching and reading, and the role of literature in the modern world. He has also shown successive generations of scholars and students the necessity of comprehending the relationship between philosophy and literature. Divided into six sections, the volume provides more than twenty significant extracts from Miller’s works. In addition, there is a new interview with Miller, as well as a series of specially commissioned critical responses to Miller’s work by a number of the leading figures in literary and cultural studies today. Following a comprehensive critical introduction by the editor, each section has a brief introduction, directing the reader toward pertinent themes. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Miller’s professional life and activities. This reader, the first of Miller's work in English, provides an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Institut für fremdsprachliche Philologien), 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Virginia Woolf took her life in March 1941. Her fear that she would no longer be able to live meaningfully, according to her ideals and particular vision of life, forced her to choose death as salvation. To her, death was not an ending. The spirit above all had to be preserved. Like her character Septimus Warren Smith, under the strain of mental illness, she threw her life away in order to preserve that which was most sacred to her - life and integrity of the soul. Probably it seems to be a contradiction - to destroy one's life in an effort to save it. There are many such paradoxes in Virginia Woolf's thinking, due to her emotional nature and to her special way of looking at life, time, and space that shapes reality itself. In this vision of life as an eternal process, the concepts of time and space, invented by man, have no meaning, because reality exists outside of them. By passing his temporal life man views all things in relation to himself and his life on the earth. But it is rather difficult to squeeze one's life among birth and death, for man permanently organises his experience into rather relative formulations of interweaving time and space. And reality, as viewed by Virginia Woolf, includes the whole expanse of space and time, and every living form brings its historic and prehistoric past into the ever-flowing stream of life. The present moment is never isolated, because it is filled with very preceding moment, and is constantly in the process of change. Time flows with the stream, having neither beginning nor end. Reality is actually timeless and spaceless, because it contains all space and all time. Believing in the eternal process, Virginia Woolf also demanded a revolution in literary technique

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.

The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf's Shorter Fiction proposes an insight into the ways in which Virginia Woolf engaged with the questions of how class influences working women's occupation of private and public space and how material privilege or economic distress inhibits or encourages their likelihood of obtaining their intellectual, spiritual, and physical desires. This groundbreaking book uses class as the determining factor to assess how servants and working class women occupy private and public space and articulate or fail to realize their desires. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts of the shorter fiction in The Monks House Papers as well as the Berg Collection, this book examines Woolf's oscillating patterns of elision, idealization, and contempt for the voices and desires of female servants, lesbians, gypsies, and other disenfranchised women. The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf's Shorter Fiction also assesses how the portrayal of working class women in the shorter fiction becomes a vital template for the representation of working class women in Woolf's novels and essays. This study of the cumulative portrayal of the working class woman in all of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction will also be compelling for anyone interested in social justice, especially for advocates of equality in gender/race/class/sexuality conflicts.

These unique essays focus primarily on Woolf's non-fiction and considers her in the context of the modernist marketplace. With research based on new archival material, this volume makes important new contributions to the study of the 'gift economy.'

Stylistic study of Virgina Woolf's fiction. Reading a novel by Virginia Woolf involves an element of `double reflexiveness': first, the reader's interaction with Woolf's words and what they describe, and second, the interaction of these words with the world Woolf perceivedand attempted to represent. Oddvar Holmesland takes this paradox and shows that it is not the invention of recent critics but something of which Woolf herself is well aware. In a number of analyses of Woolf's major works - MrsDalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves - he explores the ambiguity that Woolf's reader must work through in order to reach the insights and rewards that her fiction offers. Professor ODDVAR HOLMESLAND is Professor of English at the University of Tromso, Norway.

The difficulty of a balanced viewpoint for some of her memoirists, a demanding enough task at the best of times, was compounded by the enthusiasm with which she sometimes donned a mask and by conversation whose notorious brilliance veered at moments towards the flamboyant, the wildly inaccurate, or the cruel.

"... an invaluable aid to the reconfiguration of literary modernism and of the history of the fiction of the first three decades of the twentieth century." —Novel "... her readings of texts are quite smart and eminently readable." —Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "... a challenging and discerning study of the modernist period." —James Joyce Broadsheet (note: review of volume 1 only) "... highly important and beautifully written, constructing a contextually rich cultural history of Anglo-American modernism. It wears its meticulous erudition lightly, synthesizing an enormous amount of research, much of it original archival work." —Signs "Through her thoughtful exploration of the lives and work of these three female modernists, Scott shapes a new feminist literary history that successfully reconfigures modernism." —Woolf Studies Annual In this revisionary study of modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott focuses on the literary and cultural contexts that shaped Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes. Her reading is based upon fresh archival explorations, combining postmodern with feminist theory.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

Epic has long been regarded as the exclusive domain of the male literary genius and as an incarnation of patriarchal values. This text challenges such a hegemonic stereotype by demonstrating the ways in which women writers have successfully adapted the masculine epic tradition to suit their own needs.