A few further thoughts relating to “Mrs Dalloway” #dallowayday #20BOS26 Book 6

In my #DallowayDay post on Mark Hussey’s biography of the book, I mentioned that I’d been intrigued to learn that Virginia Woolf had written an introduction to the US Modern Library edition of “Mrs Dalloway”; and I was even more pleased to learn that I had this in “The Mrs Dalloway Reader”, a volume I’d picked up many years ago (2015!!) but somehow never read. Truth be told, I was a little wary of it; I’d read vaguely troubling reviews about some of the content and so I checked out what was actually in the book – for reference, here is the contents list: So as well as the actual book itself and the Dalloway short stories, there are a few additional items by Woolf plus a lot of essays by other people. It’s the essays which caused the most comment in the reviews I looked at so I made the decision that I wouldn’t read them. Instead, I decided to focus on Woolf’s own words and read the introduction, the diary extracts and the letter. These were, of course, very satisfying… Books are the…