Mrs Dalloway

　　《戴洛維夫人》是現代小說的里程碑。

　　作者維吉尼亞．吳爾芙以清麗精巧的意識流手法，結合女性感官特有的陰柔筆觸，捕捉漫遊縹緲聲影和內心剎那的靈動，呈現出細膩繁複的吉光片羽。

　 　《戴洛維夫人》一書，描繪戴洛維夫人從清晨為準備舉行一場宴會而外出買花，到宴會行將結束。在這一天之中，作者以克萊麗莎自己泉湧的思緒、其他人物的思 維的滑移以及全知觀點的鋪陳，讓讀者藉由被割裂的片段意象中，去重拾作者企圖表達的概念及情節。這部小說以兩個部分構成：一是時間呈現定格，讀者被引導去 沉思空間中種種不同但卻是在同一時間內發生的事件，所以有時作者引導讀者站在倫敦的一條街上窺視著很多人的意識；一是空間凝結，在一個人的意識中上下移 動，呈現人物一生中的各個片段。

　　*此中文簡介取自<<戴洛維夫人>>由高寶出版

　　On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway – fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess – sets off to buy flowers for the party she will host that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked survivor of the Great War, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness.

　　Bold and experimental, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better and better with every reading.

　　This elegant Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of Virginia Woolf's modernist classic features an afterword by editor and publisher Anna South.

維吉尼亞．吳爾芙（Virginia Woolf 1882~1941）

　　二十世紀重要的英國小說家、散文家，也是文學史上現代主義與女性主義的先鋒；她與倫敦文友創辦「布倫斯伯里文化圈」並在其中扮演要角，對二十世紀初期的英國文化影響極深。

　　吳爾芙出版多部長篇傑作，包括《達洛維夫人》，乃至充滿詩意與高度實驗色彩的《浪潮》。她同時也著墨於文學批評、短篇故事、傳記與報導寫作，包括充滿戲謔顛覆意味的《歐蘭朵》，《自己的房間》、《三枚金幣》則是激昂的女性主義論文。

　　吳爾芙天性敏感，少女時因母親與姐姐離世遭受精神創痛，之後長年受憂鬱症所苦，並於六十歲時投水自盡。

　 　Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen. She was educated at home with her sister, Vanessa, in a literary environment. The death of Woolf’s mother in 1895 and her father in 1904 led to the first of the serious nervous breakdowns that would come to feature heavily in her life. Shortly afterwards she moved with her sister and two of her brothers to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, with whom she would later establish the Hogarth Press, and also published her first novel, The Voyage Out. It would be followed by eight others, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), which together establish her position as one of the most important modernists of the twentieth century. Woolf committed suicide in 1941.