In doing this I realized just how political a novel “Mrs. I transcribed the entire manuscript myself, and I had never been that close to a text before. My approach is that the annotator is a kind of companion along with the author, a friendly voice or an occasionally critical or combative voice. Why do readers need an annotated version? That impulse to identify with a character seems to be one of the most pervasive impulses that we have. Dalloway” is the first novel I remember reading with another person and writing to them about. It hits that sweet spot in her career, the middle period of her novels, and with it a much more deliberate and purposeful understanding of her own craft, which you see in the diaries and drafts. A critic, professor and previously the author of “ The Personality Brokers,” Emre spoke with The Times from her home near Oxford University about Woolf’s conflicted politics, her modern relevance and what we can glean from analyzing her suicide note. Dalloway.” Her hundreds of notes - some quite critical - along with maps, illustrations and photographs, constitute a precious gift for the great novel’s many fans: a careful accounting of Woolf’s process. It’s a fitting metaphor for a book whose title character, Clarissa Dalloway, runs errands for her own party, which will bring the stories of its characters - London’s elite muddling past the traumas of World War I - to a dramatic conclusion.Īs the editor and annotator of this new edition, Emre functions much in the same way, leading the reader to a new understanding of “Mrs. Dalloway,” Merve Emre describes Virginia Woolf as the hostess of her 1925 modernist classic: flitting from room to room, introducing us to each of her characters in such a way that their consciousness merges with ours into a collective stream.

In the introduction to “ The Annotated Mrs. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.