Best of the Backlist Book Club: "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf

Led by Georgia Court, we discuss Virginia Woolf's dazzling novel about one day in London and a lifetime of memory, longing, and regret. The Best of the Backlist Book Club is led by Georgia Court, meant for reading what lasts, not just what's latest. November's selection is Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Set over the course of a single day in postwar London, the novel follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party, moving between the present and memories of the life she might have lived. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked veteran named Septimus Smith moves through the same city on a very different path. Woolf’s modernist masterpiece is a searching, intimate novel about time, memory, love, regret, and the private lives unfolding beneath the surface of an ordinary day. We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $11, which includes a copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: This new edition of one of Virginia Woolf’s most celebrated novels features an introduction by Michael Cunningham, acclaimed bestselling author of The Hours. Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway–a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality. This edition uses the text of the original British publication of Mrs. Dalloway, which includes changes Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequent American editions. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was born in London. A pioneer in the narrative use of stream of consciousness, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed by literary criticism and essays, most notably A Room of One’s Own, and other acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.