Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, set over a single June day in post-war London as Clarissa Dalloway prepares to host a party. The plot is almost nothing; the technique is everything. Woolf moves between consciousnesses without announcement, lets a passing car or the chime of Big Ben hand the narration from one mind to the next, and runs Clarissa’s day in counterpoint against Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran whose suicide reaches her party as a piece of news. It is one of the defining demonstrations of free indirect style and of what a novel can do with interior time rather than events.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in the University of Austin’s Writing and the English Language course, beside Hemingway’s short stories and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. The three are a deliberate range of prose registers: Woolf is the case for the long, recursive, consciousness-tracking sentence, against Hemingway’s refusal of exactly that — which is a more useful thing for a writing course than either style taught alone.

Where I saw it: On the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, November 13 2025, saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway · Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — the other two texts in the same course.
• Literature · Narrative — modernist technique, and what it does to the idea of a plot.
• Writing — the course’s subject, and the reason this is assigned as craft rather than as a novel.