Like Ulysses, which Virginia and Leonard Woolf considered for publication at the Hogarth Press, the action of Mrs Dalloway takes place over the course of a single day in June and is told through streams of consciousness, punctuated here by the leaden chimes of Big Ben. The narrative is shared between the middle-aged Clarissa Dalloway, preparing for a party, and Septimus Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, both of whose memories return to haunt them over the course of the day.





A new Faber Classics edition of Woolf's much-loved modernist novel.



Adeline Virginia Stephen (1882-1941) was thirteen when her beloved mother died. Her father, brother and stepsister died within ten years, which left her feeling like a 'broken chrysalis'. She began to experience mental breakdowns and thoughts of suicide, which haunted her throughout her life. In 1904, she moved with her sister Vanessa to the bohemian district of Bloomsbury in London, where she became involved with a group of artists and writers now known as the Bloomsbury Group, including Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912. The Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press together and published works by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as Woolf's own experimental novels, which are now considered among the supreme achievements of modernism in fiction.