Mrs Dalloway: The Novel by Virginia Woolf That Inspired the HOURS Movie
- ISBN-10
- 1549530771
- ISBN-13
- 9781549530777
- Series
- Mrs Dalloway
- Pages
- 159
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-08-18
- Author
- Virginia Woolf
Description
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925 that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister," the novel addresses Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her to assess the choices she has made in life and love. Her monologue interweaves with the account of the distress, on that same day, of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whose trauma and hallucinations end in tragedy, as the links between the two characters unfold. In Mrs. Dalloway, the novel on which the movie The Hours was based, Virginia Woolf details Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. The novel "contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century" (Michael Cunningham).
