Book covers around the world: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Welcome to a new bookish journey around the world! This post presents book covers of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. As it is a well-known classic all around the world, this book has such diverse book covers! It was difficult to choose the most interesting ones, you’ll see there are more examples than usually included in the post 🙂

Note: if you haven’t read the book, I recommend you to first get acquainted with the basic storyline, to better understand the cover illustrations and the remarks I wrote for each of them.

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Let’s start with the most basic and most common covers – portraits of elegant ladies. There is a wide variety of covers depicting realistic women, from actual photographs to delicate drawings. It’s interesting to see the many facets elegance takes in these covers (classy hats, chic dresses, bright and dark colours).

There are also book covers with more artistic drawings of ladies. Here hats are in the spotlight! It’s funny though how the second and third covers remind me of musketeers rather than Mrs Dalloway 🙂

Next are covers illustrating abstract paintings of women. I think these (more or less) ambiguous images inspire fluidity and they are actually in line with the stream of consciousness technique used in the novel. And I really like the covers!

Continuing with the feminine leitmotif, there are book covers with shapes of women combined with flowery designs. I find these combinations quite good! The last Portuguese cover (beige background with colourful delicate flowers) might be my favourite cover of all!

We had women, women+flowers … now it’s all about flowers! The book covers below focus on the flowery aspect of the story, most probably inspired by the quote “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The third cover (most colourful one) is the same book I read, and I must admit that the cover actually drew me to buy the book. No regrets!

There are also book covers with a feminine touch and different shades of pink. The Portuguese cover focuses on the time motif. The Finnish cover seems to have sort of classy embroidery, while the Swedish cover depicts pearly and flowery letters.

Here things get interesting! The following covers are from the category “what were they thinking?!”. I personally don’t see how these images could represent the story of Mrs Dalloway … From my point of view, these visualisations are way too weird and dry, and not attractive at all.

To end the journey on a pleasant note, here is the “random & nice” cluster of book covers. The Portuguese cover reminds me of streams of consciousness (or maybe a disco party?). The Greek cover is surely one of my favourites – minimalist, modern and colourful.

I also find quite interesting the idea of the Turkish cover – it depicts the young and the old Mrs Dalloway, illustrating nicely the flashbacks / flash-forwards from the story. The graphic design could have been better though.

To conclude, is it safe to say that most covers of Mrs Dalloway revolve around the feminine theme (portraits of women, flowers, pinkish illustrations). Even though the covers are diverse, I have the feeling that they could have a larger spectrum of symbols.

Which covers are your favourite ones? Do you find any covers particularly intriguing? If you know other interesting covers of Mrs Dalloway, please do share them!

‘Till next time … happy reading!

Georgiana

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All book covers are from Goodreads.com