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Updated July 22, 1997
Created July 22, 1997
"As Woolf explained in a preface she wrote for the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway published by Random House in 1928, her first conception of the novel involved only the character of Clarissa, who was either to commit suicide or otherwise die at the end of her party. A visit to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s home in June 1923 gave Woolf new ideas for the novel: ‘A loathing overcomes me of human beings – their insincerity, their vanity – A wearisome and rather defiling talk with Ott. Last night is the foundation of this complaint… I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott: I want to give the slipperiness of the soul…’ Soon after, Woolf wrote in her diary, ‘I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.’"
Mrs. Dalloway was published in Britain by the Hogarth Press on May 14, 1925 with a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, and in the United States by Harcourt, Brace & Company on the same day, with the same dust jacket.
(Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf: A-Z. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 169-173.)