ceallaighsbooks 's review for:

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Merve Emre

4.5

challenging dark reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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“Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped, picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!”

TITLE—Mrs. Dalloway (The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway)

AUTHOR—Virginia Woolf

INTRODUCTION & ANNOTATIONS—Merve Emre

PUBLISHED—orig. 1925; this edition 2021

GENRE—classic literary fiction

SETTING—London, England

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Englishness & its contradictions & inconsistencies; British Imperialism, Colonialism, & Xenophobia; Man in the modern world; love & self identity; queerness; London

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—I definitely feel like I got SO much more out of this book reading the annotated edition than I would have just by reading the book on its own. What a perfect introduction to Woolf’s fiction for me.

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring…”

(My favorite quotes from this book are all the gay ones. How lucky I get to post my review during Pride Month. 🤣)

What an interesting book with lots to love and think about! Narrated by the general consciousness of London on a single summer day in June, this story takes us through the lives of many different characters who are simultaneously disconnected and inextricably connected to each other as they live their lives in the aftermath of WWI in England.

My favorite thing about this book was definitely the writing style and seamless transitions and interweaving between character perspectives and especially how all the characterizations of every character from the main MCs to those who only got one or two sentences were constructed. Just really really beautiful and insightful descriptions and representations.

There’s a lot of problematic imperialist and racist and classist sentiments expressed by various characters in the book that the annotator said were not as far off from Woolf’s personal opinions as you might think, unfortunately, especially considering the way Woolf sort of addresses these themes in her book (although her anti-imperial/anti-colonial perspective did seem to be rooted in racism/a different kind of ethnocentrism…) but it definitely seems like she was in part aware of her hypocrisies and ethical/moral failures so it made it more interesting to read as opposed to just being offputting. 😂 (Quote from Emre’s annotations: “Woolf is critiquing what she knows best: her failure to transcend her own racism and xenophobia, as well as the impossibility of separating her individual prejudices from the institutions of the British Empire, whose doom she foreshadows in her books…”)

Btw Merve Emre did an INCREDIBLE job annotating this book. Probably the best I’ve ever encountered. Five stars for the annotations!

“It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer…”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

TW // British imperialism, classism, racism (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

• James Baldwin
• F Scott Fitzgerald 
• Cymbeline, by Shakespeare
• Gentleman Jack
• William Morris, Plato, Percy Bysshe Shelley, TS Eliot

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide