A day in a few people’s lives… or the story of a few lives in the passing of one day. As Clarissa Dalloway takes a morning
walk heading towards Miss Pym’s, the florist, to buy
flowers for the party she was giving that night, we are introduced into her life: her husband, Richard; her daughter, Elizabeth; her daughter’s history teacher and very religious woman, Miss Kilman, who Clarissa disliked a great deal; her dear friend, Peter Walsh, whom she chose not to marry many years before.When Clarissa gets home, she learns Richard, and Richard alone (without her), had been invited to have lunch with Lady Bruton, and she gets jealous. However, her mind is disturbed by something else: an unexpected visit from her first love, Peter, who, as usual, is in some trouble with women. Both of them feel a bit misplaced and awkward with one another, caught by the
feelings that memories seem to bring.At luncheon, Richard is told Peter is back from India and some kind of fear, a sense of threat, takes over him, which makes him, afterwards, buy flowers for Clarissa with the intent of saying “I love you” when handing them to her. The flowers are delivered, but the words are not…Peter goes to Clarissa’s party, where he meets Sally Seton, an old friend who had married to be now Lady Rosseter and mother of five – who would have thought!At the same time, along the book, parallel to Mrs. Dalloway’s story, we follow the madness of a First World War hero, Septimus, and the consequent suffering of his wife, Lucrezia. By the end of the day, Septimus, a man that could feel nothing and always thought human nature (or Dr. Holmes for that matter) was on him, dies by throwing himself off a window.It could be said this is a book written in a very peculiar manner, a story of unspoken feelings and self-confrontation, where the words “fear not the heat o’ the sun” seem to echo…