"The searing regret of having made the wrong decision in life and realizing it too late makes this book as heart-wrenching today as it was a century ago. Wharton’s writing style, too, is fresh and durable—surprisingly modern when compared with that of her friend and contemporary Henry James. Among the most memorable passages are her prose portraits. Her mocking 165-word description of the doyenne of New York society Mrs. Manson Mingott in chapter four is a hilarious classic of the genre"

"I first read it because it was on sale for a quarter in a bookstore in Penn Station. I thought it was going to be something like the Albee play. I read it on the train to Boston, and I felt that the prose had broken one of my ribs: it was so powerful. I had been a poet until then, not thinking of writing fiction and “Mrs. Dalloway,” let me know you could do in fiction what I wanted to do in poetry."