Mrs Dalloway (Macmillan Collector's Library)

On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway—fashionable, worldly, wealthy, an accomplished hostess—sets off to buy flowers for the party she will give that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life. On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked survivor of the great war, commits suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thought of her own isolation and loneliness.