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Mrs. Dalloway

First US edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf ⦗Adeline Virginia Stephen, 1882–1941⦘
First US edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. [vi], 296, [2, blank]. Publisher's orange cloth, white paper label to spine, printed in brown, within double rule; fore-edges untrimmed. 1/2,100 copies printed. Published 14 May 1925 at $2.50. A second and a third impression of 1,500 copies each were issued in May and August 1925, respectively.
Lacking the scarce, Vanessa Bell-designed dustwrapper, bookseller's ticket to inside rear board, else Very Good.
Listed on TIME's 2005 selection of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself". Woolf's stream-of-consciousness prose unfolds on a single summer's day as society matron, Clarissa Dalloway, prepares to host a party in the evening. Concurrently, a shell-shocked veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, provides a poignant counterpoint to Clarissa's reflections, highlighting the profound impact of war on the human psyche. Woolf very likely drew on her own mental breakdowns in her portrayal of Smith's fractured world. Throughout, she layers and interweaves the strains of the various characters' thoughts in a virtual polyphonic cantata, in the process breaking decisively with the conventions of the realistic novel.
Expanded from Woolf's short stories "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," published in the July 2023 issue of "The Dial," and the unfinished "The Prime Minister," whose manuscript draft, along with a single-page outline, is being held at the New York Public Library. The working title for Mrs. Dalloway was "The Hours" which was also the name of the 2002 film adaptation by Stephen Daldry of Michael Cunningham's eponymous book, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. The title character had previously appeared in Woolf's first book, The Voyage Out (1915). Mrs. Dalloway itself was filmed by Dutch director Marleen Gorris in 1997, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role.
Aware of her ground-breaking achievement Woolf modestly noted in her diary shortly before its publication: "I might become one of the interesting – I will not say great – but interesting novelists." It was praised by E. M. Forster thus: "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."
[Kirkpatrick A9b]
edition
first US
format
hardback
scarcity
scarce
publisher
Harcourt, Brace and Company
published in
New York
publication year
1925
ISBN
not assigned
pagination
296 pages
width × height
​14 × ​19.5 cm
genre
literary fiction
language
English
binding style
cloth
binding state
original binding
remark
missing jacket
condition
very good
GBP£ ​375
EUR€ ​449
USD$ ​495
ref.6YQ Q7R