A towering classic in English literature, Mrs. Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s story of a society woman in Edwardian England, going about her day as she prepares to throw a party. Along the way we meet a cast of characters who touch upon her day in some way or the other.

The narrative style is distinct and fascinating, though I found it a little jarring. As we progress through the day, we jump from one character’s story to another’s rather abruptly, with very little apparent reason except that the two happen to be in close proximity to one another, at some point or another. It’s as though the story were told through the eyes of a social butterfly who jumps from one group of people to another at the slightest provocation - and I suppose that’s the point, but it certainly is difficult to read. It’s a pretty interesting experiment in literature.

Alas, it wasn’t one I really enjoyed. A good part of the story arc revolves around Mrs. Dalloway’s anti-hero, Septimus Smith. He is a war veteran who is dealing with PTSD, and his story is quite a lot different from Mrs. Dalloway’s, so much so that (to the best of my understanding), his story was originally meant to be an entirely separate novel. Woolf only incorporated it into this one relatively late in her writing process. I wish that she had left them that way. I do see how the two characters complement each other, but the story lines are sufficiently divergent that I just could not get past the discordance. I found it annoying more than interesting.

I do appreciate the experimentation with time and velocity of the story. In a way Mrs. Dalloway is the opposite of To the Lighthouse, in that the former takes place in the course of a single day, and the latter sweeps over an entire decade in a few short pages. I am glad that she experimented with different approaches to time and velocity in her writing, but I thought that To the Lighthouse was considerably better-written.

This is not a very long book, and if you’re looking for an acknowledged classic of English literature, you could do worse! But you could do a bit better, as well.