Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally...

For twenty years, Anna Bouverie has been the dutiful wife of a village rector, scraping by on his pitiful salary, making cakes for the church bake sales, ironing her husband's surplices, and clothing herself and her children in hand-me-downs. But when an expected promotion to archdeacon falls through, her husband retreats into bitterness. Faced with isolation, the lost hope of a better life, and the bullying of her daughter at school, Anna finally...

Takes up the story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy a year after their wedding, when gossip and troublesome relations again cause them discomfort. A year after wedding, Christmas approaches. As happy as she has been living in relative seclusion with Mr. Darcy and his sister Georgiana at their magnificent Derbyshire estate, Pemberley, Elizabeth is sensible that the time has come to invite her mother and sister to visit her. What begins as a small and manageable...