Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway is the portrait of a single day in a woman’s life. Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation fresh flower shopping, new dress buying, and festive room decorating. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, memories flood her mind, and she is awash in the sensations of faraway times. Clarissa blissfully relives her carefree youth and early loves, stoically witnesses the approach and retreat of war’s grinding realities, carefully reexamines the solid reasons behind her practical marriage, and hesitantly looks ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old. In this revelatory and experimental novel, the past, the present, and visions of the future melt together in each and every moment. Heralded as Virginia Woolf’s greatest work of fiction, Mrs. Dalloway is not only a detailed rendering of a vivid human life, it is the outline on paper of human consciousness.