Rating: 
Summary: A well written novel but I lost interest in it.
Review: Probably because Ms. Woolf did too much TELLING and not enough SHOWING. Maybe that's why the novel is so thin. For a better representation of 20th century literature, read Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," and Salinger's "The Catcher in a Rye." The reason I bought "Mrs. Dalloway" was because I enjoyed Cunningham's "The Hours." What a disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Mrs. Dalloway
Review: This book was the best book I have ever read. You must think because of this opinion I must not have lived long. But you would be wrong. The language, the history and the suspense had me wanting to keep the book by my side always until I finished.
Rating:
Summary: Gretta's Review of Mrs. Dalloway
Review: Mrs. Dalloway is a challenging book to read. The author Virginia Woolf, known to be one of the greatest american writers. Mrs. Dalloway is a sensitive lady who is going to have a party. Madly in love with Peter Welsh, but Peter has just gotten married to a girl he met on a boat. In this book you see many deaths, and you see how life was so hard to live. It was a struggle for these people to live and Mrs. Dalloway's life seems so empty. It is a classica novel. Although, it tends to talk more about one subject, and focuses on just one subject, it is still a good book to read. It is a short novel, but yet it has its hard parts to understand. Mrs. Dalloway could never do anything for herself until she has this party. She decides that she will buy everything necessary for the party, and here you start seeing a change in her life. For her this is the most important party of all time. I enjoyed reading this book, and hopefully you will too.
Rating:
Summary: Is it overrated?
Review: It is a great novel but I have some sympathy with those reviewers who thought they were seeing the emperor's clothes. Some of its greatness lies in its originality. It was brilliantly original in 1922. At that time the typical Anglo-American novel was a baggy monster full of long-winded digressions, unlikely coincidences, stilted speech, arch facetiousness, and melodramatic adventures. (There were exceptions, and the French and Russians were doing better).
Woolf was experimenting with a new way of structuring a novel, using multiple points of view (she was inexpert at this and the shifts are often confusing) and letting the action of the plot take place in the minds of her characters. The sexual relationship between Clarissa and Sally is delicately but unmistakably hinted at.
I suppose in a way I'm saying that a classic is entitled to be difficult to read. Michael Cunningham's "Hours" is easier going for a modern American reader, but the genius of Michael Cunningham lies partly in his ability to see and illuminate for us the genius of Vitginia Woolf.
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Summary: Read "To The Lighthouse" Instead
Review: I had read three works of Virginia Woolf's - "Jacob's Room," "A Room of One's Own" and "To The Lighthouse" but had not gotten around to reading her most famous, "Mrs. Dalloway." Promos for the new movie, "The Hours," which is apparently based in part on "Mrs. Dalloway," impressed me with Nicole Kidman's performance; so I decided to see the movie, a decision which was reinforced by its nomination for a number of Oscars. In order not to miss any references in the movie, I first read "Mrs Dalloway," or tried to, as I ended up skimming it after the first 100 pages of its overall 192 page length. I have difficulties with my eyes and tend to skim if the material being read is not rewarding to me, and I do not have to discuss the material in a book group I belong to."Mrs. Dalloway" covers one day in the life of the title character who is the wife of a very well-to-do member of the British House of Commons. The time is the early 1920's; Mr. Dalloway is influential enough to at least occasionally receive the Prime Minister at his home and to be invited to functions of the royal family. That makes Mrs. Dalloway a social power house and at the end of this day she will give a dinner party which the Prime Minister is expected to attend. She has a coterie of servants experienced with such dinners but she characteristically reserves certain tasks to herself. The story starts as she walks from her home near Westminster Cathedral on a beautiful June day for exercise and to buy the flowers to be used at the dinner. If you have spent some time in central London, the places she goes and the differences between then and now are interesting. The story makes use of flashbacks, stream of consciousness techniques, and very long sentences strung together with commas, semi-colons and parentheses which can take a lot of work to decode, just as a recording of one's thoughts would be difficult to decode. The writing, except for the flashbacks, is similar to that of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," published ca 1900; Woolf's publication date of 1925 makes her work almost contemporary with that of James. James, however, never gives life to any character other than that of the lead male character, and then only to one facet of his life. Maureen Howard's introduction to my copy of the novel indicates that Woolf was consciously seeking to write in a new, unhackneyed form but hoped to avoid the appearance of the use of a "method." I think that, like James, who wrote "The Beast in the Jungle" in his "arty" period, Woolf's "art" has made her novel a less than satisfying story for me. There are similarities with Woolf's 1927 novel, "To the Lighthouse," with its much more accessible main character, Mrs. Ramsay, and which was a much more interesting read for me as I developed a fondness for Mrs. Ramsay but not for Mrs. Dalloway. It seems to me that art was used with a lighter hand in the later novel and it is more intellectually stimulating. According to one source, Woolf was very much interested in getting the reader to experience the flow of time and used various devices to achieve this. The memory flashbacks allow the author to reach outside the events of the day and place some of the attendees at the dinner in perspective and tell how they have related to Mrs. Dalloway in the past, making their presence at the dinner more significant. In contrast, "The Beast in the Jungle" and "To the Lighthouse" are more linear,covering very extended periods of time more in sequence. Both of the Woolf novels have a society matron as their central character and a dinner party takes a central place in both; in the later novel, however, the husband is an academic of much more modest means and all of the characters seem more accessible. The principal difference is that place, a home in the country, is also a character in the later work, while it is not so in the case of the Dalloway's London home. Both novels are also impacted by the First World War in a peripheral way as Woolf relates the woman's view of the war, concerned with loved ones, not battles or great political and patriotic themes. Woolf reaches outside Mrs Dalloway's society and brings in a character, Septimus Smith, who is rapidly losing his grip on reality, and his life will impact on Mrs. Dalloway's during the day. It is not clear what Woolf's motive for bringing Smith into the story was. Perhaps it was to contrast the somewhat artificial problems in Mrs. Dalloway's world, insulated as they were by wealth, to the real problems of Smith, having much more limited assets. The events of the day in the lives of Smith and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, bring "real life" into the dinner conversation that night and we read of Mrs. Dalloway's reaction to the intrusion into her party. Smith's doctors are pictured
as self-interested charlatans and one of them as bringing fear into the lives of Smith and his wife. Perhaps there was a connection with the doctors in Woolf's own troubled life into which mental illness intruded as an unwelcome stranger. Woolf succeeds to some extent in making her characters "live" but less so, for me, than in her later novel. All in all a good read if you are very interested in the art if writing, less so if the story and characterization are your main interests. If you are going to read only one Woolf work, "To the Light House" is a better choice in my opinion. By the way, my wife and I went to see "The Hours" after I wrote the above. The connection between the movie and the novel, "Mrs Dalloway," is very minor. There is some attempt to portray a small part of Woolf's life with her husband but overall the movie was more of a propaganda piece for homosexuality which never struck me as a theme in Woolf's writings. All of the major characters in the movie are portrayed as homosexuals. Hollywood loves anything that pushes the envelope.
Rating: 
Summary: total "immersion" reading.......
Review: Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway is an intricate look at the everyday life of a woman, Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party she is giving. The words embroider themselves in tiny, perfect stitches across the page giving depth and nuance to every detail of the lives and the surroundings that enfold Clarissa Dalloway throughout this single day in her life. While some people may feel like they are drowning in all the detail, for me it was like pulling a blanket over my head with a flashlight and tucking myself away from the world for a total "immersion" reading experience. The way in which the lives mirror and oppose each other was an intricate balancing act that holds your attention until the end, when they touch each other, yet never collide.
I was also interested in the frequent mentioning and comparisons using flowers, and researched Victorian Flower symbolism and was surprised at the interesting interpretations this posed.
This is a classic look at the talent and abilities of Virginia Woolf.
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Summary: Intriguing
Review: I had never read anything by Virgnia Woolf, not even in college, but wanted to read "Mrs. Dalloway" before "The Hours" which has become a bestseller here. The story stretches over one day in the life of the protagonist and explores the intricacies of human relationships, women with men, and women with women. The pain and anguish Ms. Woolf manages to portray are vivid, and proof of her genuis as a writer. If you're looking for a book with a substantial plot or even minimal action, this is not for you. "Mrs. Dalloway" instead relies on dialogue and inner thoughts of the characters to carry it along. I can see why it has been referred to as a classic.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of a day
Review: I too read Mrs. Dalloway as a prelude to reading The Hours, which I want to read before seeing The Hours. I had read and enjoyed A Room of One's Own while in graduate school. To say that I hated this book would be untrue, because in order to hate it, something would have had to have happened. They say that Seinfeld was a tv show about nothing - well this book is full of sentences that are too long, characters that are never developed, and truly about nothing. Sorry, but just because VW was mentally-ill does not mean that everything she wrote was profound and interesting. This was just plain dull. I'm hoping The Hours is better, despite its inspiration.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read, and well ahead of its time
Review: Virginia Woolf's novel reads like a long, protracted REM state. Everything takes place within one June day, with Big Ben striking out the hours in downtown London. As Mrs. Dalloway, a fairly cunning society woman, gets ready for a big party, the world whirls around her. Big political deals are struck, a war veteran goes mad and dies, a young girl is nearly seduced by a missionary of shaky sexual orientation, and Mrs. Dalloway's former lover bursts upon the scene. It's sometimes overpowering, because the sentences can ramble on for pages, but it never takes on that corny stream-of-consciousness style that so much American literature is riddled with. It's always lush and surprisingly rich with details, even when thee obversations are downright nasty. It's easy to see why Michael Cunningham chose this as a basis for his own book, THE HOURS, which features its own tightly interwoven characters. Reading MRS. DALLOWAY will give Cunningham readers a better understanding of what he accomplished with is own stunning novel.
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Summary: Appreciating the everyday every day
Review: This Virginia Woolf book is not so much a novel as it is a snapshot of life. By viewing this snapshot, we appreciate the time that we do have in life. The narrative of the book takes place in the span of a day. There is no consistent narrator here. Instead, Woolf has us go from character to character to see the world from the mind and eyes of each. This can be a little disorienting, but the reader senses the cohesion of all people and their effects on one another. Most of the time, we are seeing things from the perspective of Clarissa Dalloway on the day of a party she is giving. The other characters we see are in some way connected to her. Some are related, some are friends, some are associates, and some are just people she sees in the park. Seeing this connection should get us to pause and notice what goes on around us. I would recommend reading this book. I would especially recommend it if you are reading the Michael Cunningham book, "The Hours."
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