Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923.

Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek.

There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus.

She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race.

Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death.

The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language. Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.