Mrs Dalloway
A woman in her early fifties buys flowers for a party she is giving that evening. Across London, a veteran of the war is hearing things. The novel takes place in a single June day and moves between minds without warning, so that a street, a park or a clock can carry the narrative from one person to another.
Woolf had written two conventional novels before this one and then found a method that could hold memory and ordinary errands in the same sentence. The party at the end is not a social set piece but a structure that lets the two plots meet without either of them explaining the other.
Public-domain status
First published in 1925. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Virginia Woolf died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
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