Mrs Dalloway

What It's About

Mrs Dalloway takes place over a single June day in London, following Clarissa Dalloway as she goes about preparing to host a party that evening. Through her wandering thoughts and encounters with old friends, the novel drifts back and forth between present moments and long-buried memories, gradually revealing the choices and regrets that have shaped her life. Running parallel to Clarissa's day is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a young war veteran struggling with severe psychological trauma, whose experience of the same city and the same hours offers a darker counterpoint to Clarissa's world of parties and propriety.

Key Concepts

The novel is a landmark example of stream-of-consciousness narration, moving fluidly between characters' inner thoughts with little formal transition. The striking of Big Ben punctuates the day, tying the story to a strict sense of clock time even as characters' minds range freely across past and present. Woolf explores the psychological aftermath of the First World War, the rigidity of class and social expectation in 1920s England, and the gap between the self a person presents to society and their private inner life.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer and a central figure of British modernism and the Bloomsbury Group. She was known for her experimental approach to narrative form and her sustained interest in consciousness, memory, and gender, themes shaped in part by her own lifelong experience of mental illness.