Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance – infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life – Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist.

Originally published in 1925, Mrs Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.