Photo via W. W. Norton & Co.
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway has endured among the landmarks of modernist literature. Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel concerns a single day in the life of two people. The title character is an affluent London woman preparing her house for a party. The other is a war veteran suffering from what today would be classed as PTSD. They never meet, yet news of his suicide makes its way into her world. The novel’s literary interest comes from the way it represents multiple streams of consciousness and perspectives.
The new edition of Mrs. Dalloway is beautifully rendered, illustrated with paintings and photographs that shed light on the novel’s settings and themes. It even includes a map of London, marking Dalloway’s fictional settings as well as the city’s landmarks.
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway is introduced and edited by Merve Emre, an Oxford English professor who fell in love—she tells us—with the novel when she first read it at age 10 (too young to understand but intrigued nonetheless). As with other titles in Liveright’s “Annotated” series (including Frankenstein, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories), the canonical version of the original text is accompanied by footnotes of Talmudic length and scrutiny. They are helpful, not only in identifying names that have slipped into historical oblivion but for understanding the context for Woolf’s novel.
