The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Merve Emre book review

All through, the novel satirizes the English higher lessons as shallow and superannuated, vividly evokes the post-traumatic stress dysfunction attributable to the massacre that was World Warfare I, reminisces about an Edenic previous of rose gardens and golden afternoons, and probes, from a number of factors of view, the enigmatic essence of Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf organizes the motion round sure symbolic objects and occasions — an costly vehicle backfiring, a skywriting airplane, the crowded purchasing streets of trendy London, the Dalloway celebration — and effortlessly segues from one character’s consciousness to a different in a collection of subtly interconnected inside monologues. As befits an Oxford professor, Emre’s commentary on all that is each discovered and lucidly expressed. She neatly factors out, for instance, the parallels between an writer structuring a guide and a hostess planning a profitable celebration.