Reading schedule for Mrs Dalloway
Let's get started, shall we!
Hello friends!
First up, we will read Mrs Dalloway because it’s always good to start with a writer’s more famous works. Plenty of time to explore the backlots later. Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single day in June so it seems appropriate to read this book during June. Feel free to try reading the whole thing in a single day if you feel like a challenge. Here’s what I’m proposing:
May
Source a copy of Mrs Dalloway. Get a few friends on board if your friends are the sort of people that go in for this sort of thing.Still May
Put the book on your bedside table. Admire the lovely cover. Read the blurb. Work up some enthusiasm. Read the first page. Keep going if you like.May is taking a while
Continue to work up your enthusiasm. Watch the trailer for The Hours on YouTube and wonder if it has stood the test of time. Twenty years ago it seemed so highbrow!1 June
I will set off my figurative starting gun - pop! - and you will start reading if you haven't already. Please read the first twenty-five pages (there are no chapter markings so do your best with my vague instructions below).7 June
Finish the first twenty-five pages (which is about up to the line break just after the plane writes a T, O, and F in the sky; in other words, stop just before Mrs Dalloway returns home from buying the flowers). I will put up a post and you can add your first impressions to the comments.14 June
Read to halfway. (I think this is about where there is a line break and the next paragraph begins with – ‘It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben…’ So stop at the line break. In other words, stop after the scene between Septimus and Holmes.) I will post, summarising where we’ve got to and making some observations and you can add your comments.20 June
Summer / Winter solstice – mark in the usual way.28 June
Read to the end. I will post, summarising key moments in the second half and making some observations and you can add your comments.If people are enjoying themselves and there is any sort of momentum, we will do To the Lighthouse next and I will circulate another reading schedule closer to then.
Fun! I've been meaning to read Woolf forever.. and have not yet. Happy to jump in here!
My first encounter with “Mrs. Dalloway” was some years ago when I was working as a child protection worker for an agency responsible for a largely rural county in southeastern Ontario, Canada. To make the most of the hours I spent driving over the countryside, I often listened to audiobooks. One of the audiobooks I selected from my local library one day was “Mrs. Dalloway”. I had read some of Virginia Woolf’s essay collections years earlier, and thought that I really ought to read one of her novels.
But I found myself totally defeated by “Mrs. Dalloway” as an audiobook. No matter how carefully I listened—and I did have to pay some attention to the road and other vehicles even on backcountry roads, not to mention deer, turtles, and wild turkeys—and no matter how many times I restarted CD1, I could never figure out exactly what Mrs. Dalloway was up to apart from going out to buy flowers. I finally gave up the effort and decided that “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of those novels that demanded to be read sitting down, undisturbed, and with the reader’s full and complete attention.
So, being now retired, about a year ago I splurged on a copy of “The Annotated ‘Mrs. Dalloway’”, edited by Merve Emre. In terms of annotations, Ms. Emre really gives you your money’s worth, in addition to an introductory essay and plenty of photos, maps, and illustrations to accompany the text. The only trouble was that the extra material, instructive as it was, bogged down my reading of the novel, so I resolved that one day I would reread “Mrs. Dalloway”, this time paying attention to the text alone.
When one of my favourite Booktubers, Alyssa the Nerdy Nurse—whom I highly recommend—mentioned in her most recent newsletter that The Virginia Woolf Reading Group was taking a look at “Mrs. Dalloway”, I figured this was as good a time as any to seize the carp and join in, though this is my first experience being involved in such an internet group as I tend to be a little wary of the online jungle.