Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf, published on 14 May 1925. She had worked on it under the title The Hours, developing it out of two short stories.

The book takes place over a single day in London after the First World War, and its narrator moves in and out of the minds of the people it follows. Clarissa Dalloway is a politician's wife in her early fifties, and her day is made of errands, preparations and a party she is hosting that evening. Through her thoughts the reader learns about her youth, the man she did not marry, her daughter and her own sense of having become someone she did not entirely plan to be. Through the thoughts of others, among them a veteran whose experience of the war has left him unable to live in the ordinary world, the novel builds a picture of a city and a society in the years between the wars.

Woolf wrote the book in a stream of consciousness style, with almost no direct action and the whole structure carried by thought and memory, and it is one of the central works of the modernist period.