Mrs. Dalloway

About the book

Clarissa Dalloway prepares for an evening party while London moves around her in errands, traffic, encounters, and public sounds. Her day repeatedly opens into memories of youth and into questions about the life she has chosen. Elsewhere, Septimus Warren Smith and his wife face the continuing effects of war and the judgments of those expected to help them. Woolf moves between minds without reducing their experiences to a single explanation, making a passing sight or sound connect lives that remain socially distant. The novel's action is modest in outward scale but expansive in inward movement. It asks how memory inhabits an ordinary day, how people remain partly unknown to their closest companions, and what forms of connection a gathering can offer.

• Memory and time
• Private experience
• Connection and isolation

Why read it

For the fluid movement between minds that makes an ordinary city day feel spacious and intensely alive.

English text