Introduction

'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' The novel begins on a fine morning in June 1923 and ends late the same night. Clarissa Dalloway, wife of a Member of Parliament, walks through London to buy flowers for her party that evening; Big Ben strikes the hours, and her thoughts drift back and forth between the present and her girlhood thirty years before, when she refused the ardent Peter Walsh, who happens to return from India that very day. Running parallel to hers is the story of Septimus, a young man back from the First World War with shell shock, who sees the ghost of a dead comrade in the park, hears birds singing in Greek, and at last throws himself from a window to escape the doctors' enforced treatment. The two never meet, yet their fates meet on this one day. Using the 'stream of consciousness', Woolf takes the reader directly into the teeming, flowing minds of her characters, opening a new path for the novel.