Mrs. Dalloway (edit title)

• Rated 3 stars

“Reading too many stream of consciousness books would make me want to walk into a river with my pockets full of rocks too. ”

• Rated 0 stars

“We had to read this book over the summer for our College English class. I really loved this book but at first I found it very complex and difficult to read. I had never read anything by Virginia Woolf, so it was obviously a very new and different experience for me because I wasn't used to her style of writing. The book takes place in the course of one day for one society house-wife in England, and even though now a day you see many books that take place in one day, it's cool to think about how revolutionary this genre was when she wrote this book many years ago. I think the themes of the book, which include gender roles, the effect of war, love, sexuality, and many other things, really make you think about your own life, and the genre of the novel in general.”

• Rated 3 stars

“ Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged married woman living in London. I enjoyed this book but found overall that it is more enjoyable when put into context. This context helpful in understanding the significance of Mrs. Dalloway is that of the time period and society to which the author belonged. Mrs. Dalloway, a member of a elite British community in Westminster, feels tremendous social pressures. In Mrs. Dalloway's first interaction with Hugh Whitbread her materialism and curiosity with the lives of others becomes apparent. Another pressure felt by Mrs. Dalloway is that of her role as a mother and wife. As a wealthy mother, Mrs. Dalloway's children are taught by a separate teacher/guardian. Mrs. Dalloway also has cooks. She butts heads with both the teacher and cook and often feels ignored or overlooked.
In one of the most powerful scenes of the novel Mrs. Dalloway is informed by a psychiatrist, her guest, that his patient, Septimus Warren has committed suicide. She is at her house-party when she gets the news and she escapes to another room momentarily. Here she reflects on the decision of this stranger to take his life. She feels a deep sense of respect for Septimus because he took control of his life and ended it. He chose this instead of living his entire life unhappy and conformed. Mrs. Dalloway is moved by his action because she sees him as having done some she could never do.

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• Rated 0 stars

“I really wanted to enjoy this book. But I have a hard time with Virginia Woolfs writing, I kept reading the same line over and over, then going back to re-read and discovering it was not me reading it over and over, just Woolf repeating herself. If she would have taken out the repeating lines the book would have been half the length. It is also hard to figure out who head you are in, you think Clarissa is talking but then she is thinking about the Far East, and after a paragraph or so you realize that it is Peter thinking. I am not an unintellegent reader, I minor in Literature, but unless you are reading this for a class, or you like to read books twice to get the jist of it, I would not recommend. It was a hard book to digest and I don;t think that it was worth the struggle of trying to figure it out.”

• Rated 2 stars

“While I do recognize the genius and complexity of this book, I didn't like it very much. It was, though incredibly thoughtful and descripive, incredibly difficult to follow and keep reading. It is dense to say the least, perhaps nessisarily so, as it is a single day in a woman's life streched throughout an entire novel. Its easy to get lost in some page long description or flashback and then think "wait, whats happening here? Is there a point to this?". Furthermore (and admittedly, this is more of a personal issue) I found the long list of characters confusing and disorienting. This got to be less of an issue towards the end, but i used to mix up the male characters alot because they tended to be very similar.”

• Rated 3 stars

“I didnt really like this book because it was confusing to understand and the writing was very mundane at times. I thought that it could have been a lot better written in a way when it came to transitioning the characters. However, the fact that we were able to see the story from multiple perspectives was really interesting because it wasn't the usual single person point of view. I thought that this was a really realistic novel because it dealt with a lot life's problems and they were portrayed realistically because Woolf didnt bother sugar-coating anything and focused on the problems of society. I would definitely recommend this book only to people who have an acquired taste for Woolf's literature. It was a very hard book to get into and decipher. ”

• Rated 3 stars

“Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of different people of London society. It jumps from the perspectives of many characters ranging from an upper-calls woman, to that of a World War I veteran facing mental stress, and then to a corrupt doctor. Mrs. Dalloway’s free flowing structure is a reflection upon one of the novel’s main messages which is that life is a journey and that death is something that we all experience. The characters of Mrs. Dalloway contemplate what death will be like for they realize it is an inevitability and that the time is growing near for some of them. You can not stop the journey of life at any point for your mind is constantly at work. This is represented by the books lack of divides or chapters. The book allows us to experience many different characters and takes us on a journey to the past and the present. This represents our own lives. Each of us interacts with other people and we each think about the past. This shows another one of the books messages which is the similarity between the experiences that people go through in life so we have a greater connection to those around us than we actually know. I would recommend this book because the alternating perspectives keeps things interesting.”

• Rated 4 stars

“This book was very interesting because it really explored what it meant to be an individual and have a unique-self. Virginia Woolf follows the life of Mrs. Dalloway throughout the course of one day and she really connects how we all appear to be the same on the outside, physical world, but we are all different inside. We all can make choices because we are born with that right too. I really enjoyed how she wrote the book and how she structured it. Even though some parts might be challenging to read, it is worth understanding.”

• Rated 5 stars

“classic”

• Rated 3 stars

“A pretty creepy book. I've heard a lot of people say that reading this book was like watching paint dry (Carolyn Fagan quote right there), but I think I enjoyed this book so much because the professor who assigned it made reading it so interesting.”