Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Although I have read many, many books, both non-fiction and fiction, about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, to my shame, I had never actually gotten into one of her novels.  A recent article in the New York Times about the upcoming centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses, stated: “Nineteen twenty-two, the year of “Ulysses,” may well be ground zero for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is better captured by another year: 1925, that of “Mrs. Dalloway” and several other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as they emerge from under copyright."  The other books mentioned as coming out in 1925 I had actually read, works by Hemingway, Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  So I decided to finally approach Woolf.  The book was a surprise – it really is an experimental novel, and Woolf’s answer to Joyce’s Ulysses, which she disliked.  Like Joyce’s work, it takes place on a single day beginning with the famous line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” From there the rich, and at times confusing, text weaves among the minds and lives of several characters peripheral or central to Clarissa Dalloway’s sixty-two years of life.  Over it all, the chimes and booming hour markings of Big Ben are heard, make time itself a central character.  I really enjoyed it, but suspect it speaks more to me now than it might have if I had read it as a much younger person.  194 pp.