In the following excerpt, Guiguet discusses the relationship between the short story "The New Dress" and the novel Mrs. Dalloway's Party. He identifies prominent themes, main characters, significant action, and satirical elements of the story and praises the story as a self-contained narrative.

With "The New Dress" we come to the stories which form part of what one might call the Mrs Dalloway saga, which comprises also "The Man Who Loved His Kind," "Together and Apart" and "The Summing Up." In this group, "The New Dress" stands apart. From its date, 1927, as well as from several pieces of internal evidence, it seems to be a reject left over from the novel. We see the famous party through the eyes of Mabel, a humble acquaintance of the Dalloways. Like the other guests in the novel, she is greeted in the cloakroom by Mrs Barnet, who sizes up each...