Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge…was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
I studied this short novel years ago; my paperback is yellow and falling apart. I had the urge to read it again after walking through Westminster and up Bond Street in the early summer sunshine. It takes place on one day in June, a device other writers have since borrowed, but being Virginia Woolf, her ‘stream of consciousness’ frequently breaks through so we are taken back in time to Clarissa Dalloway’s early love, Peter Walsh, at a country house party years before. He is back in London from India and accepts her invitation to attend a party at her Westminster town house that very evening. There is a dark side to the story that tempers Clarissa’s privileged life style: a young man, distressed from serving in the Great War, takes his life; she is deeply disturbed by it. And all in one day.
A masterful, mature story, first published in 1925: a novel to savour and re-read time and again.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. But age had brushed her; even as as mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.

What is this ecstasy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.