Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway, published on May 14, 1925 by the Hogarth Press in London, covers a single day in June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, a society wife in her fifties, prepares to host a party in the evening. Her day crosses paths with Septimus Warren Smith, a young war veteran haunted by the death of a friend in the First World War and tormented by the doctors who treat him. The book moves between their minds without ordinary scene breaks, with Big Ben's chimes marking the hours.¹

Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 and printed many of her books themselves. She developed Mrs Dalloway from earlier short stories, and she was reading Joyce's Ulysses, which also unfolds in one day, as she worked. Her method moves between characters through free indirect thought, a technique often called stream of consciousness, to show how a moment contains memory and feeling. The novel quietly critiques class, the legacy of the war and the medicine of its time. It was well received on publication and has stayed in print; Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) and the film of it renewed its audience.¹