Virginia Woolf’s novel follows a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class married Englishwoman, whose inner life exists in a state of continuous tension.

She is torn between the boring conventional existence she has chosen to lead, and thoughts of what might have been, had she accepted the marriage proposal of the Bohemian Peter Walsh. But Walsh too, has his doubts, and Woolf shows that all her characters, despite making radically different life-choices, are ultimately left uneasy and questioning of their role in existence.

Outwardly self-assured, inwardly despairing, Mrs Dalloway symbolizes upper class English Society, of which the novel is, in part, a critique.