Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short-Story Sequence - Softcover

"With Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since."-Michael Cunningham,author of The Hours

The modern novel Mrs. Dalloway creates a vivid portrait of a single day in the life of one woman as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote her masterwork, she explored in a series of captivating sketches and stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party. Those seven stories collected here make up a kind of writer's notebook, a dynamic and delightful exploration of what Woolf called "party consciousness." As parallel expressions of the themes of Mrs. Dalloway, these seminal stories provide a valuable window into Woolf 's writing mind-and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.

Virginia Woolf one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel with such groundbreaking works as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The author of numerous collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

Born in 1882, the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth and Victorian scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Stephen settled in 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in 1904. This house would become the first meeting place of the now-famous Bloomsbury Group-writers, artists, and intellectuals such as E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey who, along with Virginia and her sister Vanessa, shared an intense belief in the importance of the arts and a skepticism regarding their society's conventions and restraints. It was after Virginia's 1912 marriage to Leonard Woolf-a remarkable and supportive twenty-nine-year-union-that she began to publish her major work. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915 and was followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937).

Woolf is also admired for her contributions to literary criticism in general and to feminist criticism in particular, with A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1937) reflecting the full range of her intellectual vigor, insight, and compassion for the role cast for female artists in the modern world. Additionally, Woolf s diary and correspondence, published posthumously, provide an invaluable window into her world offer-flung relationships and interests, imaginative depth, and creative method.

The victim of a lifetime of mental illness, Woolf com-mitted suicide in 1941. She left behind her a literary legacy, including The Hogarth Press, established with Leonard in 1917, which published not only Woolf s own work but that of an increasingly influential group of innovative writers-including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield.