Mrs. Dalloway Lesson Plan

Innovative for both its narrative structure and its close renderings of characters' interior lives, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel is among the most influential works of the modernist period. From the perspective of an omniscient-yet-close third-person narrator, Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a single day in June 1923, moving fluidly in and out of the minds of dozens of characters--most notably Clarissa Dalloway, an aristocratic Londoner who is married to a member of parliament, and Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran who is losing his mind. This magpie-like movement of the narrative voice reveals how small and mundane moments in human lives can be filled with reflection and emotion;...