Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

This action of this novel takes place in one day in London, recounting the thoughts and actions of several people, primarily Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party. It employs stream-of-consciousness to convey information about the characters' backgrounds, current situations, and secret desires through their rambling thoughts. With the exception of one character, nothing much really happens to anybody. All this is cleverly done, so that, by the end, the reader feels he knows the characters better than their friends and lovers do; indeed, perhaps better than they know themselves.

I had never read this book before, because I was so annoyed by her novel To The Lighthouse. I liked this one much better, but it still annoyed me. What would have been wrong with putting a little space or dividing device between the thoughts of different characters, instead of switching characters with no warning, so that I tended to read a couple of paragraphs before catching on that the "thinker" had changed? And what's up with this punctuation? Woolf uses semi-colons with great abandon, sometimes six or eight in one long sentence. And these aren't just used to separate independent clauses, as is customary. Sometimes the semi-colons separate words or phrases or sometimes a mixture. I felt the urge to take a red pen to the text and clean it up for her.

I would not recommend Mrs. Dalloway to just anybody for general reading--for a student of literature it would be worthwhile, I think. It provides considerable psychological insight, particularly into subjects unusual for the time, such as homosexuality and post-traumatic stress.