THE NEW DRESS" [first appearance in print in FORUM MAGAZINE, MAY 1927 VOL. LXXVII No.5] by [WOOLF, Virginia]: LEACH, Henry Goddard [ed] - 1927

[New York]: Forum, 1927. Printed and decorated orange, grey & black wrappers. 9 ½ x 6 ½ in. Numerous illustrations, five color plates. Fore-edges yapped with small tears and chips, spine quite chipped and missing at crown and toe. Interior is in unusually bright and in seemingly unread, very good condition. Exceptionally scare, there does not appear to be another copy of this edition presently available in commerce. Formerly in the collection of R. O. Blechman, an American animator, illustrator, children's-book author, graphic novelist and editorial cartoonist whose work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions.

Virginia Woolf's short story "The New Dress. " was written in 1924 while she was writing the novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925. Critics, in the nearly 100 years since publication, 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 this May 1927 issue of the monthly New York magazine Forum. In the story, a deeply insecure and painfully self-conscious forty-year-old Mabel Waring is a guest at a party hosted by Clarissa Dalloway. Mabel had a dress made in a style she admired in an old-fashioned Parisian fashion magazine belonging to her mother. After Mabel removes her cloak at the party, she is struck with the idea that the yellow dress is a horrible mistake, it is shabby and a true reflection of her inferiority in this social milieu. "She felt like a dressmaker's dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into" (704). She retreats to an interior monologue wherein she feeds her insecurity, thoroughly  convinced that she is the target of mockery by her fellow guests.

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.

This edition of Forum includes "Ourselves and Italy," an interview with Benito Mussolini; "Fireworks," by D. H. Lawrence with illustrations by Thomas Handforth; "Pegasus and Dobbin," by Clemence Dane; and five red and black plate illustrations, "Santa Fé, Our Empire on the Rio Grande," by Howard N. Cook; "Death Comes for the Archbishop, Instalment V," by Willa Cather, among other notable articles and authors.

. KIRKPATRICK C283.