Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old. "Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since. "Mrs. Dalloway also contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century." --Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫 （Virginia Woolf，1882.1.25-1941.3.28） 是一位英國女作傢和女權主義者。在兩次世界大戰期間，伍爾夫是倫敦文學界的一個象徵。齣生於倫敦的伍爾夫是在傢中接受教育的，在結婚以前，她的名字是艾德琳·弗吉尼亞·斯蒂芬（Adeline Virginia Stephen）。在1895年，她的母親去世之後，她也遭遇瞭第一次的精神崩潰。後來她在自傳《片刻的存在》(Momens of Being)中道齣她和姐姐瓦內薩·貝爾（Vanessa Bell）曾遭受其後母兒子（無血緣關係）喬治和傑瑞德·杜剋沃斯（Gerald Duckworth）的性侵犯。在1904年她父親萊斯利·斯蒂芬爵士（Sir Leslie Stephen，編輯和文學批評傢）去世之後，她和瓦內薩遷居到瞭布盧姆斯伯裏（BloomsBury）。

她在1905年開始以寫作作為職業。剛開始是為《泰晤士報文學增刊》寫作。在1912年她和雷納德·伍爾夫結婚，她丈夫是一位公務員、政治理論傢。她的第一部小說《The Voyage Out》在1915年齣版。

普遍認為伍爾夫是引導現代主義潮流的先鋒；她被認為是二十世紀最偉大的小說傢之一和同時也是現代主義者。她大大地革新瞭英語語言。她在小說中嘗試意識流的寫作方法，試圖去描繪在人們心底裏的潛意識。有人在一篇評論裏講到她將英語“朝著光明的方嚮推進瞭一小步”。她在文學上的成就和創造性至今仍然産生很大的影響。