On a single Wednesday in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks out into post-war London to buy flowers for the party she will give that evening. The errand is small, but the day is vast: as Clarissa crosses the city, her thoughts slip between the present and the summer of her youth at Bourton, where she once turned down the ardent Peter Walsh to marry the steady Richard Dalloway. An unexpected visit from Peter, newly returned from India, reopens every question she thought long settled.
Across the same London hours, a second life unfolds. Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran haunted by the First World War, drifts through the streets with his Italian wife Lucrezia, unreachable by the doctors who insist nothing is wrong. Woolf lets the two strangers' days brush against each other without ever quite meeting, binding a hostess and a shell-shocked soldier through the same striking clock, the same summer sky, the same nearness of joy and despair.
Told in a fluid stream of consciousness that moves from mind to mind, Mrs. Dalloway compresses a whole interior world into twelve hours. It is a novel about time and memory, about the roads not taken, and about how much of a life is lived silently inside the head while ordinary errands are run and parties are planned. A landmark of literary modernism, it remains one of the most tender and searching portraits of an ordinary day ever written.