Mrs. Dalloway

I'm watching the film The Hours. I love this film and I love Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. Neither of these are for everyone, but I absolutely adore them!

-I love the first line, which reads "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." Such simplicity to begin such a profound novel.

-I enjoy the free sentence style, though I know others do not.

-I appreciate the importance Woolf gives to the everyday life of women. In fact, I pulled out my book and was reminded of a quote my professor shared with our class when we read it: "This, perhaps, was her greatest feminism. By endowing her female characters, like Mrs. Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway, with truly random drifting thought, she endowed them with a freedom which had generally been seen by society as an idleness, as nothing more than the irrelevant freedom of housebound women sitting around thinking about nothing... In this way, Woolf turns female absent-mindedness into the most searching philosophy of the self, and we suffer with her heroines, who are suspended between forgetfulness and remembrance, between their fulfillment and their irrelevance." -James Wood "Virginia Woolf's Forgetful Selves"

Of course, I enjoy the movie almost as much as the book. It is a beautiful tying together of three women's stories- Virginia Woolf herself, a 1950s housewife, and a modern woman. If you haven't read the book or seen the movies and can handle some randomness, I highly recommend both.