Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s novel of a single day in June 1923 in London, as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, her day running alongside that of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the war.

Start reading11 parts, about 64,000 words

Famous quotes

• Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

  Part 1In context

• What a lark! What a plunge!

  Part 1In context

  • Happiness
  • Life & Death

• In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

  Part 1In context

  • Life & Death
  • Love

• She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

  Part 1In context

  • Life & Death

• The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained⁠—at last!⁠—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,⁠—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

  Part 5In context

  • Age
  • Experience

• Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

  Part 10In context

  • Life & Death

Contents

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6
7. Part 7
8. Part 8
9. Part 9
10. Part 10
11. Part 11