Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, 1925

A-level set text Edexcel A-level OCR A-level

Preparing for a party, Clarissa Dalloway moves through a London day filled with memories, encounters and private thoughts.

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Listen free: the LibriVox audiobook, read by volunteers.

Length: 1 chapters
Reading time: About 4 hr 26 min
Words: 63,329

Mrs. Dalloway4 hr 26 min

About the book

Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers while preparations continue at home. The freshness of a London morning immediately calls up another morning from her youth. Present sensation and remembered conversation occupy the same flowing movement of thought.

Woolf makes the ordinary passage through streets and rooms a way into the lives surrounding Clarissa. Attention shifts between outward activity and inward association, giving brief encounters unusual depth. The novel rewards a willingness to follow the mind's turns rather than expect events to arrive in a straight line.

On these lists

Modernist novels

This edition

Text from Standard Ebooks, who proofread and typeset it and dedicate their edition to the public domain. Virginia Woolf died more than 70 years ago, so the work is out of copyright in the UK.