“Mrs. Dalloway marks the beginning of a career that would change, forever, the ways in which novels are written, and read. It’s an intricately-wrought portrait of a place and a time, and is also a stunningly acute portrait of the multifarious experience of living a life, anywhere, at any time.”
—from the introduction to the Vintage edition by Michael Cunningham
“[Mrs. Dalloway] is an acknowledged classic, but what’s startling about looking at it with 21st-century eyes is how modern it feels. . . . Individual moments are wistful, comical, sometimes devastating, but the marvel of the novel is the way they flow into one another, capturing something essential and elusive about the way life in the young 20th century is lived and perceived.” —The New York Times
“Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” —E. M. Forster
“Hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations felicitously experimenting with the English novel.” —Jorge Luis Borges
“Virginia Woolf is one of the few writers who changed life for all of us. Her combination of intellectual courage and painful emotional sensitivity created a new way of perceiving and living in the world.” —Margaret Drabble