Clarissa Dalloway is the elegant, vivacious wife of a Member of Parliament. On a hot summer's day in London at the end of the First World War, she is preparing for a party that evening - her old lover, Peter Walsh, has just returned from India. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is going mad with shell-shock. In prose of astonishing beauty, Virginia Woolf explores how other people live, love and hate and records, through the events of one day, impression by impression and minute by minute, the feel of life itself.