The New Dress

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.