MRS. DALLOWAY(ISBN=9780679420422)

　　(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) "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 suicide 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.

　　Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now recognised as a major 20th century author, a great novelist and essayist, and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist. Elaine Showalter is Professor of English at Princeton University and a prominent feminist literary critic. Stella McNichol has written on, and edited, Woolf's novels. Julia Briggs is General Editor for the works of Virginia Woolf in Penguin.

　　"Mrs. Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours