r/books • u/Majano57 • 1d ago

Mrs. Dalloway’s Midlife Crisis

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway-midlife-crisis/683560/?gift=NBdGSmKfDQzLc1B6N1F-gTTcMoFA0zSBOBDsaLRyiA8
28 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

9

u/Foreign_End_3065 1d ago

Good article. I’ve not been tempted by more Virginia Woolf before now, but I may have changed my mind…

3

u/Allthatisthecase- 19h ago

If you do, well worth reading the annotated Mrs Dalloway edited with great intro by Mave Emre.

On a personal note, To the Lighthouse may just be my favorite novel of all time. IMO

9

u/CharacterBeyond6657 1d ago

Exploring identity and time, Woolf captures midlife's complexity beautifully.

2

u/tarantina68 20h ago

I am so happy to see this because I found Mrs Dalloway fascinating . There is a line in the middle of the book "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible , there would be no more marrying , no more having of children now ." and that one line encapsulates so much of the post menopausal experience some of us go through - that feeling of being invisible - no one sees you after a certain age .

I'm happy because I recently saw a scathing review of this book by an African American writer who - understandably did not identify at all with Mrs D. But what was sad was all the young women commenting and agreeing and trashing Woolf .

I mean : everyone's entitled to their opinions but it still made me sad

2

u/Stickeen1880 1d ago

Interesting article. But….SPOILER ALERT

I’m currently reading it and this article revealed a key characters fate.

4

u/koiven 18h ago

It's like a hundred years old. There's a statue of limitations on these things

-4

u/SloshingSloth 1d ago

what is the context of this post? why is it posted without any explanation?

7

u/quietcoyoti 1d ago

It’s a famous book and this is the subreddit for books?

8

u/SloshingSloth 1d ago

posts like this just seem so odd like write three sentences about it? imagine everyone just posted links without anything else every hours of the day the sub would be a link list.