Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in the middle of June 1923. Its plot is seemingly thin: a middle-aged society hostess is having a party; she hopes the Prime Minister will attend; she reconnects with old friends from her youth. From these slimmest of premises a whole world unfolds. Of all of Virginia Woolf’s novels, it is Mrs. Dalloway that appears to speak most intimately to our own time.

Selected contemporary reviews, both positive and negative, are included in the appendices of this edition, as are materials on the literary, political, medical, and educational contexts of the novel.

Virginia Woolf's profile page

Jo-Ann Wallace was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. In her younger years, her poetry appeared in several now defunct periodicals, including The Canadian Forum. Her scholarly work focused on little known progressive movements and women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, her literary nonfiction appeared in venues like the London Review of Books, the Literary Review of Canada, and Prairie Schooner. At the time of her death in June 2024, she was living in Victoria with her husband Stephen Slemon and their rambunctious dog Bodhi.

Jo-Ann Wallace's profile page

“With its annotated contemporary reviews, newspaper articles, and historical and medical documents, Broadview’s Mrs Dalloway is an ideal student text.” — Maggie Humm, University of East London, editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts

“Jo-Ann Wallace’s superb edition of Mrs. Dalloway offers students, scholars, and common readers a richly contextualized framework for Woolf’s fourth novel. Brief, clear, and unobtrusive annotations cover geographical, historical, economic, social, and literary allusions. A thorough yet readable introduction covers Woolf’s biography and reputation, her novel’s modernist and experimental features, and its status as a war novel. Excellent appendices capture a wide range of contemporary reactions, locate the novel within Woolf’s fictional and nonfictional canon, and give readers entry into the lived experience of the time through political, medical, educational, and social documents. The select bibliography and brief chronology are also helpful.” — Beth Rigel Daugherty, Otterbein University

“In both her introduction and her annotations, Wallace does an excellent job of explaining the genesis of Mrs. Dalloway as an aspect of Woolf’s emergent modernism. … Writings by Woolf’s own doctors, George Savage and Henry Head, as well as by W. H. R. Rivers on shell-shock, and information on Morley College and working men’s colleges complete this very well thought-out and richly detailed edition that is eminently suitable for both undergraduate and graduate classes.” — Mark Hussey, Virginia Wolf Miscellany