FOREWORD OF MRS. DALLOWAY

Penguin Classics will be publishing a new Deluxe Edition of Virginia Woolf's engulfing portrait of a day in one woman's life, featuring a new foreword by Jenny Offill, the New York Times bestselling author of Weather.

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and is on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected the interior monologue, brings past, present, and future together on one momentous day in June 1923.

MRS. DALLOWAY is newly in the public domain here in the US, but this new foreword is exclusive to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. It's an excellent opportunity for foreign publishers to set their editions apart from other editions that are currently available, and all forthcoming editions that will be published now.

Jenny Offill is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Weather; the nationally bestselling novel Dept. of Speculation, which was one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books for 2014; and the novel Last Things, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.