JasonKoivu

You can tell Mrs. Dalloway was a saucy minx in her day. *cat sound!* Christ, it's decades later and dudes are still reduced to blubbering great girls before her!

Well okay, it's only one dude. I don't want to mislead. Clarissa Dalloway had a suitor, but chose another and now she wonders if she made the right choice. That is Mrs. Dalloway in a nutshell for you.

Along the way we readers are treated to scene upon scene, flittering from one person to the next, as Virginia Woolf showcases her writing talents. Never have I enjoyed an essentially action-static novel so much! Nothing of serious consequence happens most of the time and yet this book moves! Woolf, in a style I've never seen work before, tells and tells and then slips in some action, a tidbit of excitement, then it's right back to the hasty mouthfuls of insight with barely a breath in between. Her authorial skill is masterful.

From the little I know of Woolf, it seems her own experiences and troubles played no small role in the development of the characters and their issues. I would need to read this again to say definitively that her characters are fully formed, stand-on-their-own, life-like human representations, but for the sake of the story told here, they absolutely brim with life!