title: Mrs Dalloway Reader
author:  Virginia Woolf 
description: How felicitous a pairing, that of Virginia Woolf--who elevated literature to glorious new heights with her glimmeringly beautiful prose and acute renderings of human consciousness but whose life has become the stuff of myth and speculation--and Francine Prose, a shrewd and thrilling novelist and insightful scholar of the creative process and women's lives. Prose's incisive introduction is worth the price of admission to this well-conceived study of the evolution and impact of Woolf's revolutionary novel, <i>Mrs. Dalloway.</i> Prose neatly characterizes what exactly Woolf achieves in this masterpiece, invaluable commentary that paves the way for Woolf's <i>Mrs. Dalloway's Party</i>, the sequence of seven stories that seeded the novel, and relevant entries from Woolf's diaries. Prose wisely includes the short story "The Garden Party," by Katherine Mansfield, the only writer Woolf envied, and presents a set of suitably eloquent critical essays by the likes of Michael Cunningham, Margo Jefferson, Mary Gordon, James Woods, and Sigrid Nunez. And then there's the jewel in question, <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> itself, which completes this one-of-a-kind reader. <i>Donna Seaman</i><br /><i>Copyright  American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  Mrs. Dalloway
  
  
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  A V. Woolf
  
  
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  1925
  
  
  
  
  
  (Granada 1976)
  
  
  Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself ..
  
  
  For Lucy had her work cut out for her . The doors would be taken off their
  hinges ; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming . And then , thought Clarissa Dalloway
  , what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach ..
  
  
  What a lark ! What a plunge ! For so it had always seemed to her , when , with
  a little squeak of the hinges , which she could hear now , she had burst open
  the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air . How fresh , how
  calm , stiller than this of course , the air was in the early morning ; like
  the flap of a wave ; the kiss of a wave ; chill and sharp and yet ( for a girl
  of eighteen as she then was ) solemn , feeling as she did , standing there at
  the open window , that something awful was about to happen ; looking at the
  flowers , at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising ,
  falli