Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Has there ever been a more graceful first line of a novel than that? Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is graceful and poised, like her title character, ever one to have things “just so.” Her dinner party – toward which the whole novel rushes – is sumptuous, elegant, and in every possible way, “just so.” But of course, there’s much more here than meets the eye. Old bonds as well as old rifts and hurts swirl through the party as Clarissa Dalloway confronts Sally Seton (with whom she’d had a flirtation in her youth) and Peter Walsh (whose marriage proposal she had rejected in that same youth). In this modernist novel, all time is present at once, and as Clarissa, Sally, and Peter meet at the dinner party, they’re each – individually – transported three decades into the past, reliving the scintillating and very nearly risqué time at the country estate of Bourton when Clarissa kissed Sall