Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence

Mrs Dalloway’s Party is a forgotten classic, and an enchanting piece of work by one of our most acclaimed twentieth century writers. A sequence of seven short stories that were written by Woolf in the same period as Mrs Dalloway - the opening story in the collection was originally intended to be the first chapter of the novel - they beautifully showcase the author’s fascination with parties and with all the emotions and anxieties which surround these social occasions. In ‘The New Dress’ a nervous young woman frets that her fellow guests are laughing at her yellow silk dress while ‘Together and Apart’ explores what happens to two people meeting for the first time in Clarissa Dalloway’s drawing room.

In this collection of stories Virginia Woolf created a microcosm of society out of the excitement, the fluctuations of mood and temper and the heightened emotions of the party.