Mabel Waring takes off her cloak and steps into the drawing room of Clarissa Dalloway's. She immediately realizes that something is not right : her pale-yellow silk dress, which she has had specially made for the occasion, is clearly old-fashioned, dowdy and out of place. Everyone seems to be looking at her in dismay or mocking her appearance. Crushed at once by her insecurity, Mabel is pervaded by a sense of self-loathing, and feels utter revulsion for the social world she has tried so hard to impress.
Written in 1924 and perhaps intended for inclusion in Mrs Dalloway, a book Woolf was working on at the time, "The New Dress" is accompanied by most of the stories that appeared during her lifetime, as well as six posthumously published pieces that share the milieu and some of the characters in her celebrated novel. Together, they reveal their author as one of the finest practitioners in the field of short fiction.
The most famous member of the Bloomsbury Group, the novelist, essayist critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of Modernism's leading exponents, as well as a pioneering feminist.
Mabel Waring takes off her cloak and steps into the drawing room of Clarissa Dalloway's. She immediately realizes that something is not right : her pale-yellow silk dress, which she has had specially made for the occasion, is clearly old-fashioned, dowdy and out of place. Everyone seems to be looking at her in dismay or mocking her appearance. Crushed at once by her insecurity, Mabel is pervaded by a sense of self-loathing, and feels utter revulsion for the social world she has tried so hard to impress.
Written in 1924 and perhaps intended for inclusion in Mrs Dalloway, a book Woolf was working on at the time, "The New Dress" is accompanied by most of the stories that appeared during her lifetime, as well as six posthumously published pieces that share the milieu and some of the characters in her celebrated novel. Together, they reveal their author as one of the finest practitioners in the field of short fiction.
The most famous member of the Bloomsbury Group, the novelist, essayist critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of Modernism's leading exponents, as well as a pioneering feminist.
