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On a single day in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. Her thoughts move back and…
On a single day in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening. Her thoughts move back and forth between the present and her youth, to the man she did not marry, while in another part of the city a young veteran of the war, Septimus Warren Smith, struggles with visions he cannot share.
Context and significance
Published in 1925, Mrs Dalloway follows the inner lives of its characters as they cross each other's paths, marked by the hours struck by Big Ben. It is one of the great modernist novels and one of the most humane, especially in its portrait of war trauma. It came out of copyright in the United States in 2021.
About the author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.
Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.