num_pages: 185
description: 'Fear no more the heat of the sun.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith isyoung, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.
language: English
title: Mrs Dalloway
titlecomplete: Mrs Dalloway
characters: Peter Walsh, Hugh Whitbread, Doris Kilman, Lucrezia Smith, Sally Seton, Septimus Warren Smith, Elizabeth Dalloway, Sir William Bradshaw, Clarissa Dalloway, Richard Dalloway
genres: 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Novels, School, Literature, English Literature, Classics, Feminism, British Literature, Fiction
ratings_count: 291447
places: England, London, England, United Kingdom
publisher: Oxford University Press