Mrs Dalloway

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected the interior monologue, brings past, present and future together on one momentous day in June 1923.

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was a major modernist novelist and the centre of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves. She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including A Room of One's Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.