Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Barnes,
Nightwood
; Charlie Chaplin,
Modern Times
(film); Aldous Huxley,
Eyeless in Gaza
; J. M. Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
; Rose Macaulay,
Personal Pleasures
; Margaret Mitchell,
Gone with the Wind
.
 
 

 
 
1937       
Years
published. Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Neville Chamberlain becomes prime minister.
Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
; David Jones,
In Parenthesis
; Pablo Picasso,
Guernica
; John Steinbeck,
Of Mice and Men
; J. R. R. Tolkien,
The Hobbit
.
 
 

 
 
1938       
Three Guineas
published.
Germany annexes Austria. Chamberlain negotiates the Munich Agreement (“Peace in our time”), ceding Czech territory to Hitler.
Samuel Beckett,
Murphy
; Elizabeth Bowen,
The Death of the Heart
; Jean-Paul Sartre,
La Nausée
.
 
 

 
 
1939       
The Woolfs visit Sigmund Freud, living in exile in London having fled the Nazis. They move to Mecklenburgh Square.
Germany occupies Czechoslovakia; Italy occupies Albania; Russia makes a nonaggression pact with Germany. Germany invades Poland and war is declared by Britain and France on Germany, September 3. Deaths of W B. Yeats (b. 1865), Sigmund Freud (b. 1856), and Ford Madox Ford (b. 1873).
James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake
; John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
; Nathanael West,
The Day of the Locust
.
 
 

 
 
1940       
Roger Fry: A Biography
published. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” in the
New Republic
. Woolf lectures on “The Leaning Tower” to the Workers Educational Association in Brighton.
The Battle of Britain leads to German night bombings of English cities. The Woolfs’ house at Mecklenburgh Square is severely damaged, as is their former house at Tavistock Square. Hogarth Press is moved out of London.
Ernest Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
; Christina Stead,
The Man Who Loved Children
.
 
 

 
 
1941       
Woolf drowns herself, March 28, in the River Ouse in Sussex.
Between the Acts
published in July.
Death of James Joyce (b. 1882).
Rebecca West,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
.
 
 

 
 

I NTRODUCTION
    BY B ONNIE K IME S COTT
    Â 
    I N HER OWN introduction to
Mrs. Dalloway, 1
Virginia Woolf took the attitude that “one has too much respect for the reader pure and simple to point out to him what he has missed, or to suggest to him what he should seek” (n). She dealt instead with misconceptions about her work that she felt the critics had encouraged, given their initial preoccupation with fitting the novel into a predefined artistic method. There is much to enjoy in just plunging into
Mrs. Dalloway
, “pure and simple,” and no guarantee that the critics will get it right. But as someone who has taught and enjoyed this work for many years, I can’t resist pointing out a few things that shouldn’t be missed. These include ways that Woolf’s method evolved in the course of writing
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf helped with this genealogy of the text by leaving behind contemporary notebooks and diary entries commenting on her formal discoveries, as well as early drafts (see Wussow). Woolf also suspects in her introduction that readers will be curious about ways the author is reflected in her work: “Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here and there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences” (n). Along these lines, we will want to consider attitudes as various as Woolf’s love of social gatherings enriched by conversation, and her distrust of doctors, based on her own treatments by them. Her remark about the “roots” of her tree betrays her interest in psychology, which plays out in
the minds of her characters as they flash back to previous events and early acquaintances.
    The novel is set in London on a Wednesday in