Mrs. Dalloway.

WOOLF, Virginia.

Item Number: 3229

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.

First American edition of Woolf’s great modernist novel. Octavo, original cloth. Small name and date of 1925 on the front free endpaper, near fine in a very good dust jacket with a few small chips to the crown and a chip to the front panel. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare in the original dust jacket.

"In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf breaks decisively with the fictional conventions of the realistic novel. The technique is almost orchestral, introducing and then interweaving the strains of the different characters’ thoughts, and finally engineering, through a subtle sequence of readjustments and realignments, a new and delicate harmony between them at the close of the book. Mrs. Dalloway thus initiated Woolf’s sequence of radical experiments with literary form, embodying a striking combination of fluid sympathy and secret resistance. Through the novel’s rapid transitions between apparently disconnected, but secretly related stories, Woolf was able to suggest the hazards of neatly pigeonholing human character according to social situation or gender" (Parker, 110-11).