05-05-2025
Mrs Dalloway turns 100 — here's why Virginia Woolf's novel is a masterpiece
I first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a teenager and remember a feeling of being borne along by a stream of shimmering beauty, although my understanding was limited. I have returned to the novel many times since and its emotional resonance has changed with each reading.
The novel — published in May 1925 by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, and celebrating its centenary this year — opens with the line 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself' and gives us Clarissa, walking in London on a morning in June and planning her party. What began as a short story, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (in which Clarissa buys gloves, not flowers), became Woolf's modernist masterpiece and a radical reinvention of the writing of
