Mrs. Dalloway

“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”Wednesday, June 1923; post-war Britain. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”And thus begin the preparations of Clarissa Dalloway’s party. As she goes around London, memories of the past embrace her and she is left introspecting about the decisions she has made in life and love. In another part of the city, Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the First World War, is spending the day with his wife. He is suffering from shell shock and hallucinations.What happens as their day and life entwines? Narrated in the stream of consciousness mode, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a unique novel in that it takes place in a single day. The novel highlights the broken inner state of people after the First World War. One of her greatest achievements, the book was included in the Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. The novel has undergone various film adaptations and continues to inspire its readers.