Mrs Dalloway

One of the most celebrated and important modernist novels in English, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best novel. Originally titled ‘The Hours’, a title that Michael Cunningham would retrieve and use for his 1998 novel based on Mrs Dalloway and Woolf’s own life (a book that would in turn be adapted for the 2002 film starring Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose), Mrs Dalloway is at once a powerful response to the First World War and a lyrical exploration of the role of memory itself. Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman’s life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighbourhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter’s marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband, Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. Peter leaves and goes to Regent’s Park. He thinks about Clarissa’s refusal, which still obsesses him.