Overall thoughts on the book:
I wouldn’t recommend this book. But I mostly wouldn’t recommend it in the same way that you wouldn’t recommend a newspaper from 6 months ago. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just boring and there have to be better things to read.
The whole book is fuzzy. There’s very little dialog, which is fine, but the point of view keeps switching back and forth without warning, so that you never know whose thoughts you’re listening to. I couldn’t wait to be done with this book.
Also, I saw claims of this book as being some great lesbian classic, but the book mostly revolves around Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway thinking about her husband and her almost husband. There are only one or two mentions of her being in love with her good friend.
More details on the book and lots of spoilers:
Mrs. Dalloway is basically a day in the life of an older woman in 1920’s London. She married rich and so it seems like mostly what she does is throw parties.
When Clarissa Dalloway was younger, she had two very good friends, Peter and Sally.
Sally and Clarissa were best friends decades before the book starts. And Peter was a very close friend of theirs.
Peter had been in love with Clarissa and even proposed to her but Clarissa turned him down. It’s seems that Peter thinks that Clarissa is a bit of a snob but he never really falls out of love with her.
Peter moves to India to start a new life. He gets married and is very unhappy. He’s only coming back to England briefly, but he stops in to tell Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway that he has come back to England to get a divorce from his current wife so that he can marry another woman. He seems generally unhappy.
Sally was wild in her youth. She was always the life of the party and no one ever thought she would settle down, but eventually, she too married rich and moved to Manchester.
There were more characters that I am not bothering to mention because I didn’t think that they were interesting enough, and frankly, I didn’t really know why I was reading about them.
Final thoughts:
This is just a story about some people who are planning to go to a party. It’s very repetitive. It’s almost all internal monologue, but the point of view jumps from one head to the next. I would not recommend
Bayous and Books 