Book 40: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway [100 Great Books]
An exploration of the private inner lives hidden beneath ordinary events
In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf covers a single June day in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, the wife of a Conservative MP, sets out to buy flowers for the party she is throwing that evening. She walks through the West End in the morning light, and as she goes, she weighs the comfortable life she chose against the wilder one she refused with Peter Walsh, who loved her and was too much, and Sally Seton, the friend whose kiss long ago she still counts as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life.” Peter, as it happens, returns from India that very morning and turns up at her door unannounced.
