Edward Mendelson

Virginia Woolf's most famous novel, now in a new edition that reflects the author's own revisions to the work for the first time ever. This is the definitive edition of one of the most important novels of the 20th Century, complete with a cover inspired by the original Hogarth Press design to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the original 1925 publication. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's tale of a day in the life of one upper-middle-class woman, is of the best known and most celebrated novels of the twentieth century. It is a simple novel, on the one hand, in which its protagonist goes about London preparing for the party she will hold in the evening. It is also a complex novel, one that interweaves Mrs. Dalloway's story with those of a shell-shocked veteran, of her old lover, of her unhappy teenage daughter. Together, they form a haunting, mesmerising picture of individual loneliness and post-World War I British society. As Virginia Woolf wrote of it: "I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense." This new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, published to mark the centennial of its original appearance, will be followed by new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves in celebration of their respective centenaries. All featuring specially commissioned covers that pay tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press, these editions are meticulously and sensitively edited by scholar and literary critic Edward Mendelson, and are the first to reflect the full range of revisions Virginia Woolf made to her three greatest novels.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. The story of a single day in London after the First World War, it travels backward and forward in time and consciousness, venturing beyond the ordinary world into epic, mythic, and mystical modes. The novel is a work of extraordinary richness, as much for its interwoven webs of meaning as for its moral and psychological vision. Edward Mendelson explores the novel’s deepest questions, focusing on the core themes of medicine, empire, and love. He traces how Virginia Woolf thought and wrote, considering the complexities and resonances of her works. Mendelson casts Mrs. Dalloway as an extended protest against authorities that wield power over others and a defense of the equality of inner lives. He also examines the place of the book in literary history going back to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare as well as its influence on later writers from Erich Auerbach through Zadie Smith. Both incisive and passionate, this book is at once a wide-ranging critical study of Virginia Woolf’s writing and a love letter to a great novel.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. The story of a single day in London after the First World War, it travels backward and forward in time and consciousness, venturing beyond the ordinary world into epic, mythic, and mystical modes. The novel is a work of extraordinary richness, as much for its interwoven webs of meaning as for its moral and psychological vision. Edward Mendelson explores the novel’s deepest questions, focusing on the core themes of medicine, empire, and love. He traces how Virginia Woolf thought and wrote, considering the complexities and resonances of her works. Mendelson casts Mrs. Dalloway as an extended protest against authorities that wield power over others and a defense of the equality of inner lives. He also examines the place of the book in literary history going back to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare as well as its influence on later writers from Erich Auerbach through Zadie Smith. Both incisive and passionate, this book is at once a wide-ranging critical study of Virginia Woolf’s writing and a love letter to a great novel.

Presented in one volume for the very first time, and updated with new archival discoveries, Early Auden, Later Auden reintroduces Edward Mendelson's acclaimed, two-part biography of W. H. Auden (1907-73), one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. This book offers a detailed history and interpretation of Auden's oeuvre, spanning the duration of his career from juvenilia to his final works in poetry as well as theatre, film, radio, opera, essays, and lectures. Early Auden, Later Auden follows the evolution of the poet's thought, offering a comparison of Auden's views at various junctures over a lifetime. With penetrating insight, Mendelson examines Auden's early ideas, methods, and personal transitions as reflected in poems, manuscripts, and private papers. The book then links changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, and religious experience with his shifting public role--showing the depth of his personal struggles with self and with fame, and the means by which these internal conflicts were reflected in his art in later years. Featuring a new preface by the author, Early Auden, Later Auden is an engaging and timeless work that demonstrates Auden's remarkable range and complexity, paying homage to his enduring legacy.

A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writers including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W. H. Auden Edward Mendelson s "Moral Agents" is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelson s view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives. Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, "Moral Agents" presents challenging new portraits of eight writers novelists, critics, and poets who transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individuals inspired, troubled, hugely ambitious who reimagined what it means to be a writer. There s Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs. Norman Mailer s extraordinary ambition, suppressed insecurity, and renegade metaphysics muddled the novels through which he hoped to change the world, yet these same qualities endowed him with an uncanny sensitivity and deep sympathy to the pathologies of American life that make him an unequaled political reporter. William Maxwell wrote sad tales of small-town life and surrounded himself with a coterie of worshipful admirers. As a powerful editor at "The New Yorker," he exercised an enormous and constraining influence on American fiction that is still felt today. Preeminent among the critics is Lionel Trilling, whose "Liberal Imagination" made him a celebrity sage of the anxiously tranquilized 1950s, even as his calculated image of Olympian reserve masked a deeply conflicted life and contributed to his ultimately despairing worldview. Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish emigre background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage. Perhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W. H. Auden and Frank O Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. Its lasting power has proven to be something different from its avant-garde reputation: personal warmth, individuality, rootedness in ancient traditions, and openness to the world."

She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . .--Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse An illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts--portray the essential experiences of life. Edward Mendelson--a professor of English at Columbia University--illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human condition while expressing its author's complex individuality and intentions and emerging from the author's life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representation of child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal but almost impossible adult love, and leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us--in the most captivating way--why they matter.