---
product_id: 4143135
title: "Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition"
price: "168 kr"
currency: NOK
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.no/products/4143135-mrs-dalloway-the-virginia-woolf-library-authorized-edition
store_origin: NO
region: Norway
---

# Stream of consciousness narrative Authorized original edition Set in post-WWI London Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

**Price:** 168 kr
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Summary

> 📖 Unlock the mind’s labyrinth—don’t just read, experience Mrs. Dalloway!

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
- **How much does it cost?** 168 kr with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.no](https://www.desertcart.no/products/4143135-mrs-dalloway-the-virginia-woolf-library-authorized-edition)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Key Features

- • **Complex Character Web:** Explore interconnected minds through Woolf’s innovative stream of consciousness technique, demanding and rewarding focus.
- • **Cultural & Historical Insight:** Gain a nuanced understanding of post-WWI British society, class dynamics, and the human psyche.
- • **Timeless Literary Masterpiece:** Experience Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking psychological fiction that reshaped 20th-century literature.
- • **Immersive Single-Day Narrative:** Dive deep into a vivid portrayal of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, blending past and present seamlessly.
- • **Collector’s Authorized Edition:** Own the original, authorized edition with a foreword by Maureen Howard—perfect for discerning literary connoisseurs.

## Overview

Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition presents the original, authorized text of Woolf’s seminal modernist novel. Set in post-WWI London, it follows Clarissa Dalloway’s single day through a revolutionary stream of consciousness style that explores memory, identity, and social class. This edition includes a foreword by Maureen Howard and is a must-have for readers seeking a profound literary challenge and a deep dive into early 20th-century psychological fiction.

## Description

The authorized, original edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece and one of the most "moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century" (Michael Cunningham), with a foreword by Maureen Howard. In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house in post-WWI London for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past―the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old. From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway ―a landmark of psychological fiction―reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it. “Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster

Review: How to Throw a Party - Though there are some passing resemblances to Jane Austen, the comedy of manners, and Victorian narrative satire, this is a modernist novel and a fairly accessible introduction to Woolf, unless the reader is overly impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, now loud, and rarely without irony. Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love. She uses the term "Human Nature" ironically, making it refer to those individuals who cannot see with understanding, empathy or vision, substituting for "life" the ego's own conventional, reductive and limited sense of a world that's all surface and order. Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the head to spin and the earth: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures a microcosm of life not to mention the life of language itself. The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. It's a moment highly reminiscent of Gabriel Conroy's singular internal struggle and ultimate attainment of vision in the closing paragraphs of "The Dead" (Woolf was not especially fond of Joyce, but it's hard to believe she was not influenced by him). At that moment, Clarissa sees her affinity and even oneness with Septimus, a character who suffers internally but is capable of resisting the worse alternative of the "cures" offered by Dr. Bradshaw, one of the guests at Clarissa's own party. The insight produces action: one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as existential cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls. (The "Death of the Soul" is a theme introduced early in the novel by the insightful Peter, a "failure" by society's standards and his own admission and someone who cannot get the better of his fixations--on the irretrievable past and his own youth. By the story's end, it is not Peter but Clarissa who presents a whole and integrated self, capable of separating the illusory from the real, of the once dependent "Mrs. Dalloway" from the newly enlightened "Clarissa." Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it feels like a mechanical assembly next to the vibrant novel that is its source and inspiration. Ms. Woolf, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.
Review: A challenge for the authoress a challenge to the reader- But Virginia Woolf makes the writing look easy - I must admit to some confusion. I think I have read Mrs. Dalloway, word for word, beginning to end. My uncertainty arises because I suddenly found myself, too soon, at the end of the book. My Kindle copy had jumped ahead about 15%. Not the fault of the book, my reader has been a tad twitchy. I did page back to where I thought I was, and I check against a few on line plot summaries. My real problem was that this is a book where you can miss parts and not always know that you have skipped ahead, or behind. The story of Mrs. Dalloway is the story of several people more or less connected to Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway. Each character is experiencing the same day, the day leading up to a party by the title character. Mostly we learn about these people by listening in on their thoughts, random mental notions and occasionally as they look at or speak with another of the fictional circle. The technique is a variation on Stream of Conscious. Not just the mental world of one person but of several , as they interact or move away from interaction. Ms Woolf's ability to take us into the heads of a diverse cast is art not artifice. The transitions from interior monologue to interior monologue are rarely announced. Rather we are lead into a thought that might apply to either the original thinker or the new one. That is the reader must pay attention or will have to go back a page and realign to the new character. Conclusion, this is not intended as a casual read. The audience for this book needs to stay focused. I had problems being this focused. Characters let their minds wonder. This is how normal minds work. But I found that it lead to my mind wandering and costing me the thread. Knowing that I have gone a woolgathering even as the fictional characters do, I suspect I have missed parts of a well written book. The physical setting Ms Woolf chooses is upscale, London. We are in or near Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Regent's Park and the time is just after World War One. Almost all of the characters are what I think of as the Mayfair Set. In my mind the cast is largely upper middle income, but not titled or financially independent. They are mostly conventional and all financially vulnerable. Clarissa herself has lived a life of privilege with no important responsibilities and we find her to be the shallowest. Her teenage daughter Elizabeth may grow past her mother, but her indecision to become a farmer or a doctor is almost comical given her lack of serious thought about either choice. Elizabeth has a history teacher, one of the few dependent characters who is at once filled with religious inspiration and jealous hatreds. The only other representatives of eh lower, or middle, middle class is Septimus, an man suffering what we would now call post traumatic shock from his war time experiences and his Italian wife, who trims hats and does not understand the threats in her husband's head. For the rest characters are more or less shallow. Their thoughts center on typical moneyed class problems: creating or keeping employment, surviving long lost loves, trying to remember when it was that life stopped being a thing of possibilities. No thought process is so important that the person has to stay focused on it until it is fully thought out. Always there are distractions. Virginia Woolf does tell a masterful story. The minds we inhabit are credible and well written. What are missing are clear individual idiosyncratic styles that would identify each individual brain in a minimum of words. This may be deliberate by Mw. Woolf. A way of saying we are all alike before we are all different. Mrs. Dalloway is worth reading. It may be a book that needs more than one reading. It is one that demands concentration. The lives we will visit are not that interesting. The technique used to tell us about them is.

## Features

- Portada aleatoria

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #9,615 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #9 in LGBTQ+ Classic Fiction #17 in LGBTQ+ Historical Fiction (Books) #21 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.1 out of 5 stars 5,964 Reviews |

## Images

![Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71gFRamMa1L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How to Throw a Party
*by S***L on May 14, 2007*

Though there are some passing resemblances to Jane Austen, the comedy of manners, and Victorian narrative satire, this is a modernist novel and a fairly accessible introduction to Woolf, unless the reader is overly impatient or tone-deaf. Woolf creates a character's interior life through a virtuosic, highly mobile third-person narrator, who might be thought of as the character's "persona," not merely "expressing" the character's thoughts but "mirroring" how the character perceives him or herself as seen by others. Moreover, the indefinite pronouns can shift unexpectedly or occur in too close proximity to make identification easy or even definite. As a result, the reader has to work overtime to achieve entrance into the mind of the "right" character while simultaneously sensing the liquid, interpenetrating and shared qualities of human identity itself. And finally there's that tone, now soft, now loud, and rarely without irony. Woolf makes it fairly easy on the reader with the broad, sardonic strokes she uses to paint the practically villainous Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent psychiatrist viewed by many (especially himself) as the scientific high priest of this cross-section of deluded London luminaries; and she's equally nasty to her other "villain," Miss Kilman, a repressed and embittered born-again Christian who, like Sir William, lives by the code of "conversion," Woolf's euphemism for those powerful personalities who are bent upon breaking, controlling and dominating the will of anyone not strong enough to resist them. The other portraits are more subtle, requiring the reader either to hear the soft, nuanced ironical tones or risk missing both the social satire and the character. Woolf's targets range, perhaps not surprisingly, from the pretense, pride, and hypocrisy of an out-of-touch social stratum that clings to the "orderly" past; to the arrogance of modern medical "science"; to, more surprisingly, the suffocating alternatives offered by both religion and love. She uses the term "Human Nature" ironically, making it refer to those individuals who cannot see with understanding, empathy or vision, substituting for "life" the ego's own conventional, reductive and limited sense of a world that's all surface and order. Readers lured to this novel because of Cunningham's "The Hours" (novel or film) may be disappointed or quickly frustrated. Moving from Cunningham to Woolf is a bit like going from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, or from Austen to Shakespeare. What you immediately notice is the far greater range and more inclusive thematic focus and, most importantly, the sheer power and vitality of the prose (from fluid motion to dynamic rush). Woolf--like Joyce, Faulkner, and Shakespeare--employs a syntax that can cause the head to spin and the earth: she's a writer who represents not merely individual characters but captures a microcosm of life not to mention the life of language itself. The greatest challenge "Mrs. Dalloway" presents to a first-time reader is never to let up. It's essential to stay with Clarissa throughout her entire day, finally becoming a fully engaged participant in the party itself--the final thirty pages of the novel, which contain some of Woolf's best writing. Especially critical is the extended moment, almost 20 pages into the party scene, when Clarissa, like Septimus, walks to the window and has her epiphany. It's a moment highly reminiscent of Gabriel Conroy's singular internal struggle and ultimate attainment of vision in the closing paragraphs of "The Dead" (Woolf was not especially fond of Joyce, but it's hard to believe she was not influenced by him). At that moment, Clarissa sees her affinity and even oneness with Septimus, a character who suffers internally but is capable of resisting the worse alternative of the "cures" offered by Dr. Bradshaw, one of the guests at Clarissa's own party. The insight produces action: one character chooses death; the other, life. But Woolf enables us to see these apparently opposite choices as existential cognates: both characters make choices that enable them to save their souls. (The "Death of the Soul" is a theme introduced early in the novel by the insightful Peter, a "failure" by society's standards and his own admission and someone who cannot get the better of his fixations--on the irretrievable past and his own youth. By the story's end, it is not Peter but Clarissa who presents a whole and integrated self, capable of separating the illusory from the real, of the once dependent "Mrs. Dalloway" from the newly enlightened "Clarissa." Cunningham is a first-rate stylist and craftsman who can tell a story that's moving and evocative, a narrative, moreover, that connects with today's readers by affirming the choices available to the self. But it feels like a mechanical assembly next to the vibrant novel that is its source and inspiration. Ms. Woolf, like her character Clarissa, knows how to throw a party.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A challenge for the authoress a challenge to the reader- But Virginia Woolf makes the writing look easy
*by P***D on July 26, 2014*

I must admit to some confusion. I think I have read Mrs. Dalloway, word for word, beginning to end. My uncertainty arises because I suddenly found myself, too soon, at the end of the book. My Kindle copy had jumped ahead about 15%. Not the fault of the book, my reader has been a tad twitchy. I did page back to where I thought I was, and I check against a few on line plot summaries. My real problem was that this is a book where you can miss parts and not always know that you have skipped ahead, or behind. The story of Mrs. Dalloway is the story of several people more or less connected to Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway. Each character is experiencing the same day, the day leading up to a party by the title character. Mostly we learn about these people by listening in on their thoughts, random mental notions and occasionally as they look at or speak with another of the fictional circle. The technique is a variation on Stream of Conscious. Not just the mental world of one person but of several , as they interact or move away from interaction. Ms Woolf's ability to take us into the heads of a diverse cast is art not artifice. The transitions from interior monologue to interior monologue are rarely announced. Rather we are lead into a thought that might apply to either the original thinker or the new one. That is the reader must pay attention or will have to go back a page and realign to the new character. Conclusion, this is not intended as a casual read. The audience for this book needs to stay focused. I had problems being this focused. Characters let their minds wonder. This is how normal minds work. But I found that it lead to my mind wandering and costing me the thread. Knowing that I have gone a woolgathering even as the fictional characters do, I suspect I have missed parts of a well written book. The physical setting Ms Woolf chooses is upscale, London. We are in or near Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Regent's Park and the time is just after World War One. Almost all of the characters are what I think of as the Mayfair Set. In my mind the cast is largely upper middle income, but not titled or financially independent. They are mostly conventional and all financially vulnerable. Clarissa herself has lived a life of privilege with no important responsibilities and we find her to be the shallowest. Her teenage daughter Elizabeth may grow past her mother, but her indecision to become a farmer or a doctor is almost comical given her lack of serious thought about either choice. Elizabeth has a history teacher, one of the few dependent characters who is at once filled with religious inspiration and jealous hatreds. The only other representatives of eh lower, or middle, middle class is Septimus, an man suffering what we would now call post traumatic shock from his war time experiences and his Italian wife, who trims hats and does not understand the threats in her husband's head. For the rest characters are more or less shallow. Their thoughts center on typical moneyed class problems: creating or keeping employment, surviving long lost loves, trying to remember when it was that life stopped being a thing of possibilities. No thought process is so important that the person has to stay focused on it until it is fully thought out. Always there are distractions. Virginia Woolf does tell a masterful story. The minds we inhabit are credible and well written. What are missing are clear individual idiosyncratic styles that would identify each individual brain in a minimum of words. This may be deliberate by Mw. Woolf. A way of saying we are all alike before we are all different. Mrs. Dalloway is worth reading. It may be a book that needs more than one reading. It is one that demands concentration. The lives we will visit are not that interesting. The technique used to tell us about them is.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ What it means to be human
*by G***R on December 9, 2018*

For me this was less a story than an exploration of life and what it means to be human. And, by necessity, how to get the most out of the lives we live, which, as Woolf reminds us, go by in the blink of an eye. Woolf is a superb writer; perhaps one of the greatest of all time. And this may well be her best work, made all the more impressive by the fact that she used the stream of consciousness technique that jettisons many of the rules most readers are familiar with. There are no chapters, for example, and many of the most important sentences are so short and simple, by design, as to be overlooked. I won’t say it’s difficult to read but you do have to get used to it. The storyline has been well documented by other reviewers. Set in London following the First World War, we follow the day of Mrs. Dalloway, hostess extraordinaire to the “ruling class”, and the wife of an English bureaucrat in the upper crust of the British government but who will never quite grab the golden ring of appointment to the Cabinet. The achievement and the shortcoming both define him in equal measure. There is a long list of characters, many of them quite minor, but to whom Woolf devotes considerable print. That, I believe, is quite by design, because each represents a different representation of the human reality that we each, at some level, accomplish something, but that none of us ever quite realize complete and utter fulfillment. We choose who we are but can never quite choose who we ultimately want to be. It is the duality of human existence and there are no exceptions. Even Mrs. Dalloway, who has devoted her life to living in the present, faces the same existential dilemma. She is admired by some, tolerated by others, and quite disliked by a few. She is, in a word, human and, as a result, she is both defined and burdened by her duality. One of the characters is Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran of World War I who suffers from what we now call PTSD. He is, in terms of the storyline itself, a minor character, to the point that many have questioned his inclusion. To me, however, he is a central character and the book couldn’t exist without him. And even Woolf herself admitted, when challenged on this, that he was the double of Mrs. Dalloway. Smith is central, it seems to me, because if Mrs. Dalloway hides the doubt and ambiguity of her life successfully, he loses himself to the same ambiguity quite obviously. They are quite like yin and yang, the complementary forces of light and dark, fire and ice, the masculine and the feminine. One cannot exist without the other. In the end it would be difficult to describe this work as uplifting. It is life. And life, as Woolf reminds us, despite pockets and moments of glamour, is always a bit messy and dispiriting. Life is a duality. Tragedy occurs alongside grace. Doubt inevitably accompanies hope. Can there be the joy of success without the crush of failure? All told I think this is a superb book and if you have any interest in exploring the duality of our existence there is a great deal here, in what is a relatively quick read.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Mrs. Dalloway: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
- To The Lighthouse: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
- A Room of One's Own (The Virginia Woolf Library)

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.no/products/4143135-mrs-dalloway-the-virginia-woolf-library-authorized-edition](https://www.desertcart.no/products/4143135-mrs-dalloway-the-virginia-woolf-library-authorized-edition)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Norway*
*Store origin: NO*
*Last updated: 2026-09-17*