Manuscript draft of “The Prime Minister” (a story related to Mrs. Dalloway)

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) was a groundbreaking achievement for Virginia Woolf. “I might become one of the interesting—I will not say great—but interesting novelists,” she wrote in her diary shortly before its publication. Now considered an essential work of modernist literature, the novel—which unfolds on a single summer’s day around a London society matron preparing to host a party and a shell-shocked war veteran—explores consciousness and life after World War I. The origins of Mrs. Dalloway are found in this notebook. Here, amid the final chapters of her novel Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf penned (with many revisions) “The Prime Minister.” This 18-page story, along with a single-page outline and some notes on possible revisions, would form the core of Woolf’s masterpiece.