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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Woolf is not easy, but this book makes her easier, January 2, 2004
Francine Prose's Mrs. Dalloway Reader makes the enigmatic and brilliant Virginia Woolf's masterpiece and bit easier for us modern readers. Since the publication of Cunningham's spectacular The Hours and the movie titled the same, Woolf's writing has undergone a renaissance, rising once again on bestseller lists everywhere. But she's STILL difficult, with the loooong sentences, endless paragraphs, the convoluted windings of words and thoughts and phrases and explanations and descriptions and disclaimers with which her writing is rife. This book is the missing link. It includes the complete text of Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Dalloway's Party, plus relevant journal entries and letters by Virginia Woolf relating to the creation of Mrs. Dalloway. Also included are essays and reviews by other writers, all about Mrs. Dalloway. Taken all together, these snippets function like a lovely roadmap into not only the character of Mrs. Dalloway, but into the mind of her creator. Top notch.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There she was, February 8, 2006
This review is from: The Mrs. Dalloway Reader (Paperback)
`Mrs Dalloway' is a kind of cultural phenomena.
Everyone that I know has a different take on who she is, what this book is, and what the novel is supposed to stand for. Enter into this fray the authors own opinion about the whole of it and you have an all-out melee of fiction versus fiction.
This book, The Mrs Dalloway Reader, attempts to focus this problem somewhat. In it, not only will you find the novel itself, but you will also find various supplementary materials that help to ease you into what this novel is and what it means to so many different people. From those whose experience began with trying to impress a girl (and the lucky happenstance of finding the book at a Book-Mobile) to those who fought off the strains of absinthe addiction, the short pieces in range from essays to the first `draft' of the novel `Mrs Dalloway's Party'. Include in this assortment such lovingly-crafted emulations as Jane Mansfield's `The Garden Party' and you've got yourself a real winning combination.
But is this a good reason to buy this book? Don't you need more reasons? Of course!
Take this one: I knew absolutely nothing about Virginia Woolf when I purchased this book. She lived about 100 years ago. She wrote many books and I've seen some of her diaries in the hands of female students when I was in high school about ten years ago. She is popular with the intelligent-female group, those who want to be well-read and know the difference between Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Add to this that I am a guy. Now, take all that and combine it, dashing in the fact that this book single-handedly introduced me to who Virginia Woolf is and what she stood for- just through the supplementary material- and you have not only a great novel but a good place to get your foot into the door of this wonderful writer.
Is that still not enough? Okay: supplementary material aside, how is the book? Wonderful. It is a style of writing that I've heard called `Impressionistic' by some learned person. This is true- until you read Virginia Woolf (who is far easier to understand than other stream-of-consciousness writers such as Joyce) you have no idea what great pictures such simple things as words can express. Mrs Dalloway does this too, moving the reader through a simple narrative that is painted with poetical words, bringing to life a novel that is to fiction what Renoir is to painting; only the basic outline is there, amid all the broad strokes, and you must look to find it...but it is amazing when you see it.
LP
Bottom line: If you know nothing about Virginia Woolf and want a good, solid platform from which to start, pick this one. If you know a lot about her and want to explore more, you pick this one too.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Writer Negotiates the Works of a Brilliant Writer, December 10, 2006
Francine Prose is one of our more important writers (novels 'Blue Angel', 'After', 'A Changed Man', 'Primitive People'; probing biographies 'Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles'), a writer with a profound respect of the past, for the art of writing and the art of reading. Her most recent book is titled 'Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them' should give an idea of what is in store in this most enjoyable and illuminating book THE MRS. DALLOWAY READER.
Prose writes an Introduction that, while brief, offers keys to unlocking the genius that was Virginia Woolf. 'She longed to fill the book [Mrs. Dalloway] with "speed and life", to "give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticize the social system & to show it at work, at its most intense.' Prose extracts quotes form Woolf's writings in an astute manner that allows us to understand the tortured genius who wrote them. As far as the book 'Mrs. Dalloway', Prose writes '...its all here: life, death, sex, love, marriage, parenthood, youth, age, the present and the past, memory, London, war, reason and unreason, loyalty, medicine, social snobbery, friendship, compassion, cruelty; the occasionally apt but more often unfounded snap judgments we make about ourselves, each other, loved ones, strangers, and the world in which chance and fortune have thrown us all together'. She touches on Woolf's insanity and conflicted sexuality that blossomed with Vita Sackville-West, and with her suicide by drowning, but she is far more interested in sharing the manner in which Woolf created her books - her fleshing out of the state of consciousness.
As editor Francine Prose then gathers writings form such erudite dignitaries as Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Michael Cunningham, Daniel Mendelsohn, Sigrud Nunez et al, couples these observations with Woolf's own serialized beginnings of her famous novel, and then offers us the entire MRS DALLOWAY at the end of the book. Reading Virginia Woolf in this atmosphere serves to enlighten the reader and once again prove that this novel is one of the more important writings of the last century. This book is a treasure! Grady Harp, December 06
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