College Fashion Post Link Up: Mrs. Dalloway

So, my latest "Looks from Books" post came out on College Fashion this past Wednesday, and while I wouldn't usually double back to do individual posts about past material, I enjoyed the inspiration for this paticular post so immensely, I thought it would be completely remiss of me to ignore it. After all, I did name Mrs. Dalloway as one of my Top Reads of Sophomore Year, so it merits a little more attention from me, I think.

It isn't all that frequently that you read a book where the words just kind of make you lean back and *thunk* against your chair, and say, "Wow." That, for me, was the result of reading the expertly crafted prose, courtesy of Virginia Woolf, that flows circuitously throughout the jumbled narratives of one brief June day in London, chronicling the intermixed lives of many, including the titular party hostess Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, an ex-lover named Peter Walsh, Dalloway's daughter Elizabeth and the latter's teacher Mrs. Kilman, and, of course, the doomed WWI veteran Septimus Warren Smith (my favorite character).

The novel itself is a modernist classic, and one of the many new works I experienced this past year in my "Early 19th C. English Literature," alongside Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and E.M. Forster's Passage to India. If anyone's looking for a solid read for the summer, replete with beautiful descriptions and an easy-to-read style of writing, you should definitely give Mrs. Dalloway a try. It's one of those books that you discover new things in every time you reread, as well, so you can bet I'll be giving this one another go once I've done a suitable amount of damage to my currently-towering TBR pile.

Here's a brief preview to the looks inspired by this work, with an outfit that pays homage to my favorite part of the novel, the winding and wandering fluidity of the narrative, unimpeded by changes of consciousness and character, and realized in the form of luxe layers and flowing fabrics.

See the rest of the looks here!