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The New Dress | Introduction

Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘‘The New Dress’’ was written in 1924 while she was writing the novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925. Critics have entertained the possibility that the story may originally have been a chapter of the novel because some of the same characters and events appear in both works. The story was published in the May 1927 issue of the monthly New York magazine the Forum. In the story, a deeply insecure and painfully self-conscious guest at a party is convinced that she is the target of mockery.

Leonard Woolf later republished ‘‘The New Dress’’ in the collection A Haunted House in 1944, three years after Virginia Woolf’s death. It was republished in 1973 in the collection Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, with other stories by Woolf that focus on the guests and events of the day leading up to Clarissa Dalloway’s party.

The New Dress Summary

In Woolf’s 1924 short story ‘‘The New Dress,’’ Mabel Waring arrives at Clarissa Dalloway’s party and is instantly consumed by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. These negative feelings are set off by concerns that her new dress in not appropriate for the occasion. Immediately after greeting her hostess, she goes straight to a mirror at the far of the room to look at herself and is filled with misery at the conviction that ‘‘It was not right.’’ She imagines the other guests exclaiming to themselves over ‘‘what a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!’’ She begins to berate herself for trying to appear ‘‘original’’: since a dress in the latest fashion was out of her financial reach, she had a yellow silk dress made from an outdated pattern. Her selfcondemnation verges on self-torture, as she torments herself with obsessive thoughts of her foolishness ‘‘which deserved to be chastised.’’ She thinks of the new dress as a ‘‘horror . . . idiotically old-fashioned.’’ When the stylishly dressed Rose Shaw... » Complete The New Dress Summary