The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf, annotated by Merve Emre

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

With that simple sentence, Virginia Woolf opens one of the defining novels of literary modernism.

Set over the course of a single June day in London, Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for an evening party. Around her, memories surface, old relationships return, strangers pass through the city, and individual lives overlap without always touching.

The story moves fluidly between characters and consciousness, slipping from the present into memory and back again. Woolf turns an ordinary day into something immense, exploring time, class, love, regret, identity, war, and the private worlds people carry within them.

Alongside Clarissa is Septimus Smith, a veteran profoundly altered by the First World War. Though the two never meet, their stories become intertwined within the novel’s larger meditation on what it means to be alive, to suffer, and to be seen by others.

This annotated edition, edited and introduced by literary scholar Merve Emre, offers an especially rich way to enter Woolf’s world. Alongside the complete novel are extensive annotations, 150 photographs and illustrations, manuscript material, artwork connected to the Bloomsbury Group, and a map tracing Clarissa Dalloway’s route through London.

For readers discovering Woolf for the first time, or returning to her work with curiosity about everything happening beneath the surface.

A Note from The Literary Garden

We paired Virginia Woolf with the Hoya Rope Plant for its extraordinary growth.

Its vines curl, twist, double back, and continue onward, much like Woolf’s prose moving through thought, memory, sensation, and time. What first appears tangled reveals its own rhythm when you stay with it.

And then, from all that winding growth, come flowers.

Book Details

Authors: Virginia Woolf and Merve Emre
Pages: 242
Illustrated: Yes, with 150 photographs and illustrations
Publication Date: August 31, 2021
Dimensions: 9.3 × 7.4 × 1 in