On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess sets off to buy flowers for the party she is to give that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day Septimus Warren Smith, a shellshocked survivor of the Great War, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness. Bold and experimental, Mrs Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better with each reading.

With an Afterword by Anna South.