Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. The story of a single day in London after the First World War, it travels backward and forward in time and consciousness, venturing beyond the ordinary world into epic, mythic, and mystical modes. The novel is a work of extraordinary richness, as much for its interwoven webs of meaning as for its moral and psychological vision.

Edward Mendelson explores the novel’s deepest questions, focusing on the core themes of medicine, empire, and love. He traces how Virginia Woolf thought and wrote, considering the complexities and resonances of her works. Mendelson casts Mrs. Dalloway as an extended protest against authorities that wield power over others and a defense of the equality of inner lives. He also examines the place of the book in literary history going back to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare as well as its influence on later writers from Erich Auerbach through Zadie Smith. Both incisive and passionate, this book is at once a wide-ranging critical study of Virginia Woolf’s writing and a love letter to a great novel.

"A rip-roaring tribute to a canonical work forged from diverse literary and philosophical traditions." - London Review of Books

"Mendelson fixes his erudite scholarly gaze upon the woman behind the novel and behind the endlessly fascinating Clarissa Dalloway, raising this study from academic criticism to a reminder of the pleasures of reading the novel anew." - Center for Fiction

"Mendelson’s original reading of one of Woolf’s great novels serves to restore for us the balance between Woolf’s profound insights into the enigmatic inner life of human beings and her cogent historical narrative of the wrongs done in the outer world to women by oppressive patriarchy." - The Hindu