On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway – fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess – sets off to buy flowers for the party she will host 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 shell-shocked 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, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better and better with every reading. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King's College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women's higher education. Woolf began writing professionally in 1900.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She published her first novel The Voyage Out in 1915, through the Hogarth Press, a publishing house that she established with her husband, Leonard Woolf. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay "A Room of One's Own" (1929).