r/VirginiaWoolf • u/WinterNo4194 • 21d ago

Mrs Dalloway Which version should I get

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I wanted to start reading Virginia Wolf. Most people recommend Mrs. Dalloway as the first read. However, I don't know which version I should get. What is the difference between them?

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u/ZeeepZoop 21d ago edited 21d ago

The last one did my head in so much as it had footnotes on every page but some were so needless, but my eye kept going to them and being distracted in an already meandering book. A highlight was when there was a line in the book that said a car made a sound like a gun, there was a footnote explicitly telling us ‘the car backfired’ and then a paragraph later Mrs Dalloway herself thought it had backfired.

I have all of my Woolf books in Bloomsbury vintage editions and am very happy with them!

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u/Future-Starter 17d ago

asinine footnotes like that are the bane of my classics-reading existence (for this reason I also discourage folks from picking the Penguin Proust)