Yet as the evening approaches, the unexpected arrival from India of her first lover Peter Walsh, triggers vivid memories of the past until, piece by piece, Clarissa bring to the row so many years ago that precipitated her uneevntful marriage.
She is suddenly and startlingly aware of the force of the life going on around her; of Septimus Warren Smith going quietly mad with shell-shock; of her daughter Elizabeth, almost now a woman, and of Peter, unaltered, yet changed as she feels herself to be. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf reveals the differences in the way people think and see and treat one another, brilliantly evoking the fell of the time and, through the eyes of each character, the feel of life itself.