Professor Anne Fernald's Critical Edition of Mrs Dalloway Reviewed by the TLS

Fordham English Professor Anne Fernald’s edited critical edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published by Norton, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement on Nov 19, 2021 by Emily Kopley. Noting that Fernald’s critical edition is geared towards an academic reader, Kopley writes:

“Fernald offers a pithy introduction, a discreetly annotated text and a tremendous amount of complementary material gathered from Woolf’s diary entries, letters, short stories, essays and early writing, as well as literary sources, historical documents, early reviews of the novel and excerpts from recent criticism. Fernald previously produced a textual edition of the novel for the ongoing Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, and for Norton she relies on her extensive familiarity for concise commentary.”

The author also writes that Fernald’s introduction to the edition opens with a superb analysis of the opening sentence and that her edited text functions like a syllabus—referring to Fernald’s provision of Woolf’s diary and letter extracts in the edition in a manner that encourages an academic reader to explore the material and draw one’s own connections.