Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

On a single June day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. As Big Ben marks the hours, the novel moves in and out of the minds of the people around her. There is Peter Walsh, the man she refused to marry, just back from India. There is her husband Richard, who can't quite find the words to tell her he loves her. And there are memories of Sally Seton, the bold friend of her youth. Across the city, Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran shattered by the war, is drifting further from the world around him. Clarissa and Septimus never meet, yet their days mirror each other until the evening's party.

Woolf follows her characters' thoughts as they surface, so a few hours in the city hold whole lifetimes of memory, regret and desire. The result is a short, luminous novel about time, mortality, the costs of the choices we make, and the will to keep living.