TLDR Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

On a June day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, a London politician's wife, buys flowers and prepares an evening party. Her old suitor Peter Walsh returns from India and unsettles her. Across the city, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, is failing under doctors who don't listen. His wife Rezia tries to help. Septimus jumps from a window and dies. At the party, the doctor Bradshaw mentions the death. Clarissa withdraws, thinks it through, then returns to her guests. Peter sees her and feels overwhelming excitement. It is one day, two strangers, and a lot of thinking.

• The book was almost called The Hours. Woolf's working title was The Hours, a nod to the striking clocks that mark off the single day. She settled on the heroine's name instead.
• Clarissa Dalloway existed before this book. She first appears in Woolf's debut novel, The Voyage Out, from 1915. Ten years later she got her own book and a much bigger party.
• Woolf and her husband published it themselves. Mrs Dalloway came out in 1925 from the Hogarth Press, the small press Virginia Woolf ran with her husband, Leonard. The author basically had the publisher on speed dial.

• “Clarissa dies at the end.” Wrong body. Septimus dies, not Clarissa. She finishes the book alive and among her guests, and the final line is Peter's: 'For there she was.'
• “The whole story takes place over a week.” Seven days? Nope. It is one day in June, from the morning flower shopping to the evening party, with Big Ben striking the hours along the way.
• “Clarissa married Peter Walsh in the end.” Peter wishes. Clarissa turned him down years earlier and married Richard Dalloway. Peter, back from India, is still tangled up in that old decision.

• If they say: “Do Clarissa and Septimus ever actually meet?”
  You say: “No, never. Clarissa only learns of his death when Dr Bradshaw brings it up at her party, and she absorbs it privately in a side room before rejoining everyone.”
• If they say: “Isn't it just a book about a party?”
  You say: “Sort of, but the party is only the last scene. Most of it is one day of inner thoughts, with Septimus's story running alongside Clarissa's.”