Extract

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

A woman steps into a London morning to buy flowers for her party, and the day opens around her like a series of rooms she has been entering all her life. Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel unfolds across a single June day in 1923, moving fluidly between Clarissa Dalloway's preparations and the shattered consciousness of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran the city cannot save. The two never meet, yet their lives rhyme with a devastating precision. Woolf's prose drifts from mind to mind without announcement, dissolving the boundaries between selves the way a city dissolves the boundaries between strangers. Time here is not a line but a wave, carrying the past into every present moment, making memory the truest form of being alive.