100th Anniversary: Revisiting Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs Dalloway has been reissued in Korea to mark its 100th anniversary as Minumsa World Literature Series no. 484. Regarded by BBC as one of the 100 novels to read, the book captures a single day in June 1923 London as Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party while memories, emotions, life and death intersect in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf shifts perspectives to probe the inner lives of some 20 characters, using everyday sounds — Big Ben, street noise, park breezes — to build a psychological landscape. The novel also examines post–World War I trauma through Septimus, the social pressure to “normalize” veterans, and the emptiness beneath upper-class life, raising enduring questions about loneliness, class, gender, and mortality. Praised for distilling the eternal within a single day, the book asks what it means to live fully.
