Mrs Dalloway

Review

This was the November pick for our Small Press Fiction Book Club. I liked it! I wish I could say I loved it, but that’s not quite true. I found it really challenging to read. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, paired with very long sentences and a myriad of commas and semicolons and parentheticals takes a lot of effort to hold through. You can almost feel yourself running out of breath; I have to imagine that’s intentional.

At one point, I had to stop and read out loud to myself, because I was having such a hard time focusing. I could also feel, clearly, that I was not letting myself soak in it in quite the way that it wanted. I felt that I was missing things, or at least not giving them proper weight. Part of that is I felt pressured to read fast, because I was reading late.

I shared in book club that I suspect this is a title that will reward re-reads, and those re-reading agreed. I knew once I read Woolf’s Introduction (which is placed AFTER the text, to my delight, I wish this were the standard), specifically her comments on Septimus, that I’d missed an emotional core of the novel.

I plan to re-read this after a year or so, I think I will appreciate it more when I can focus and let it come through slowly. In the mean time, I think I’ll plan to pick up Orlando to get a sense of another work by Woolf.

Notes