BOOK REVIEW: MRS DALLOWAY

 “It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”

Mrs. Dalloway is a psychological novel. It was published in 1925. It is considered one of the best works of Virginia Woolf. It has a steam of consciousness element that's the reason it was a groundbreaking novel of its age. From 1925 till this year it is widely praised for its unique and innovative format. 

Virginia Woolf's this novel gives details about a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. The novel was often called "a novel of one day" Though it is about a day when it came to reading, I couldn't read it in one day. Reading it was a sweet, also depressing labor in itself. This novel was the second novel of Virginia Woolf I read. The first one was "To the Light House" two years ago, this year I read only her love letters book.

In 1925 one review stated, "Virginia Woolf makes one aware of one's own mental experiences in a way no other contemporary writer has ever achieved." That's what I think too, I didn't only read it, I absorbed it. At first, I was smiling as Clarissa's day went on and new characters came in. But the middle and end made my soul cry. I don't know, is this me emotional girl or it is such a lovely relatable piece out there.  

The novel started with Clarissa Dalloway preparations for a party, who is a high society woman, story revolves around that party and also social glimpses of the First World War in England. It also shows how Mrs Dalloway tried to come out of depression, how she struggled through mental illness and throwing parties just to hide her condition. A quote from the novel, 

"Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”

There is one thing engaging for readers while annoying for beginners I guess. It is a game of time that both present and past periods are going parallel, without any title or number. So beginners get confused about which scene is from the past and which scene is from the present. Virginia's characters think a lot and make a mixture of past and present for the reader too. Isn't it confusing? 

"He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

Whatever it was, coming to point, Virginia's style of writing is difficult at first to read but deep touching and engaging. It will get more out of you than you know about yourself as a psychiatrist do. I found myself in her novels. I can relate to it. Many quotes into it, 172 pages only, while many themes it touched like Time, madness, society and class, love, Isolation, Warfare, sufferings, fear of death, so on. Quotes and ending which I loved the most.

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? 

     It is Clarissa, he said.

     For there she was.”

Recommended it to those, who know they will not give up on reading Virginia at all, and definitely to those who love such difficult and moving novels. 

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”