Mrs. Dalloway

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”

In her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf took on the subject of the English middle classes in the aftermath of World War One. The novel has become one of Woolf’s most famous works and one of the defining texts of literary modernism. Woolf’s pioneering ‘stream of consciousness’ technique reflected her desire to show the multifaceted nature of consciousness and to capture the impact of the fast-changing modern world on the psyche. A dream-like narrative carries the reader through a crowded city and into the minds of different isolated individuals: we particularly focus on Mrs Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society lady and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked young demobbed soldier.

Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; what action there is takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories.