Mrs. Dalloway
London: Hogarth Press, 1925. First Edition. Fine in an evanescent dustjacket with 2 tears at the front panel’s top, small chips, and a split the length of the spine panel closed on the verso with a thin strip of tissue, else very good and fresh. Fine / very good. Item #316
Let’s talk about great. Just because many voices say a book is great doesn’t mean it’s a great first edition to buy, but here’re 4 facts about this one. Mrs. Dalloway is a great novel, by a great novelist, and a great book to collect for its significance, and it’s of great scarcity in its fragile jacket (check, check, check, check, Book Code). Most label it a modernist novel, some call it formalist, or post–impressionist. I’d just say it’s quieter than a wispy draft, misting through the breaches in a broken heart. Custom half morocco case.
Mrs. Dalloway represents Woolf at the height of her experimental powers. The novel's intricate stream-of-consciousness technique maps the interior landscape of its characters with devastating precision as they move through a single day in post-war London. Woolf's innovative narrative structure—following multiple consciousnesses that intersect and diverge like passing strangers in Kew's flower beds—creates a tapestry of modern existence both celebrated and mourned. The famous first edition from the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press bears witness to Virginia's evolved artistic vision, with each surviving jacketed copy a testament to literary revolution housed in disarmingly modest form. Like the snail traversing the garden bed in "Kew Gardens," Clarissa Dalloway's journey through memory and present moment achieves a rare symmetry between the ordinary and profound, between social performance and private anguish—all rendered in prose that shimmers.
Price:
$37,500.00