No novel has opened with a sentence so misleadingly simple. Eight words. A woman's name, a declarative verb, a domestic errand. On any other page this is the opening of a story about a party. On Woolf's page it is the opening of a new method. Because what follows those eight words — and only follows them, not precedes them or frames them — is the entire interior life of a middle-aged woman moving through a city on foot. Mrs Dalloway is not going to have a plot in the old sense. She is going to have a day. Woolf is betting the whole book on the claim that a day, properly rendered, is as eventful as anything the novel has ever promised.

Clarissa steps out into Westminster. The air is fresh. Big Ben will strike the hour a few minutes after her door closes. It is June 1923. The war is five years over; the city is in its first full uncancelled summer in a decade; the flowers at Mulberry's will be there at ten. She is giving a party that evening. She is fifty-one. She has a grown daughter, Elizabeth, who has been going through a religious phase. She has a husband, Richard, who is a Conservative MP, who loves her without quite knowing how to say so, who will bring her roses at lunch and find himself unable to say the sentence that goes with them. She has, in an upper-middle-class London life, most of what her education prepared her to want, and she is walking down Bond Street in the morning wondering why there is nevertheless a small insufficiency she cannot quite locate.

The opening walk to the florist is the whole of Woolf's method. She moves, mid-sentence, between the outer London — buses, shops, park, policeman — and the inner Clarissa — a memory from the summer of her eighteenth year, a phrase her old friend Peter had once said to her, a sensation of the air on her neck, a worry about her daughter — without once leaning on a transitional paragraph. The reader is on Bond Street and in 1889 and at next Tuesday's party all in the same breath. Woolf called it the tunnelling process. She said, in her diary, she was digging caves behind her characters. The caves connect. The surface, the daylit walk to the florist, is continuous. Underneath, the caves open.

Clarissa buys the flowers. She walks home. The novel is ten pages in. Nothing has happened. Everything has happened. The tunnelling has been started, and for the next three hundred pages it will be excavated in every direction — through her husband, through her old lover Peter Walsh who has just come back from India, through her prim old friend Sally Seton who had once kissed her in a garden, through the ruined veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whom Clarissa has never met but whose death is going to cross her party at half past ten. The method is the book and the book is the method. The flowers are in the house by noon.

Clarissa is back from the florist. She is upstairs mending a torn place on the dress she will wear to the party that evening. The parlourmaid comes in. A man is downstairs. She has not caught his name. He says he is an old friend.

Clarissa goes down. And there in her drawing-room is Peter Walsh. Thin, grey, travel-worn, a little dusty at the shoulders of his jacket. Peter has just got off the boat from India. He is fifty-three. Thirty summers ago, at Bourton — Clarissa's family house in the country, the summer she was eighteen — he proposed marriage to her. She refused him. She married Richard Dalloway instead. Peter went to India. He took the Indian Civil Service examination. He has been a district administrator for thirty years. He has been married once, in India, to an Anglo-Indian woman who bored him. He is now, in his own estimation, a slight failure, back in London to arrange a divorce and to try to obtain a post for the woman he is currently in love with.

He comes into Clarissa's drawing-room with a pocket-knife open in his hand. He has been fiddling with the knife on the train; he has not put it back in his pocket. Woolf, who does everything by detail, is very specific about the knife. It is the whole of Peter in an object. He has come to see his old first love and he has walked into her house with an open blade. He is — he would deny this — a man who has come to settle a thirty-year grievance.

They talk for fifteen minutes. It is one of the novel's great scenes of interior and exterior simultaneity. The words on the surface are ordinary: how was the voyage, how is India, who is that in the photograph on the desk. Underneath, each of them is recalculating the whole of the last thirty years. Peter: I am in love with a married Indian woman, and I have come home to get her, and I want Clarissa to see I have not been ruined by her refusal. Clarissa: he has come to pity me, or to judge me, or to tell me he is still in love; whichever, I am going to keep my nerve and I am going to keep mending this dress. Peter, without warning, bursts into tears. Clarissa, startled, puts her arms around him. He says, in the middle of his tears, the sentence in the epigraph: I am in love. He means: I am in love with someone else. He means: I have recovered. He does not mean, and Clarissa does not exactly hear, a third thing: he is also still, after thirty years, in love with her.

The scene ends when her daughter Elizabeth comes in. Peter gathers himself. He rises. He says goodbye. He walks out into Westminster, still carrying the pocket-knife. He walks for hours. He has encountered, in his head, the whole of the life he did not live. Clarissa, upstairs, sits a long moment at her sewing table. She does not cry. She thinks: if I had married Peter we would have been at each other's throats every day for thirty years. She thinks: and yet. She thinks: and yet. And she picks up the dress and continues to mend the torn place.

On the same morning, in a different part of London, a young man sits on a bench in Regent's Park beside his wife. He is twenty-nine. His name is Septimus Warren Smith. He has been home from the war for five years. He is a quiet, handsome, overeducated clerk at an insurance firm. He has come home from France in 1918 without a visible wound and has been, by steady degrees, going out of his mind.

In the trenches he had a friend. An officer named Evans. Evans was killed, quite late in the war, a few days before the Armistice. Septimus did not cry. He did not feel anything. He thought, in that moment, that he had congratulated himself on not feeling anything. He thought he had proved — he had been worrying about this for months — that he was a real man after all, a man who could bear what men were supposed to bear. He came home. He married Rezia, a young Italian milliner he had met while billeted in Milan. They moved to London. He took a clerk's job. He rose in it. He began, at twenty-six, to feel he had survived.

And then, somewhere in his third year back, the not-feeling began to reverse. Small things at first. A sentence overheard in the Tube. The sight of a dog being run over. He began to weep, without warning, in public places. He began to hear things. He began to see things. Evans, he believed, was speaking to him. Not always — only sometimes, and only when he was alone. Evans was telling him secret truths about the nature of the world. Evans, who was dead, was telling him, from the other side, that the world was good, that there was a pattern, that the trees were speaking, that the sparrows were speaking, that the whole of London was, under its surface, a message to which he, Septimus, had the key.

Rezia has taken him to doctors. A doctor named Holmes has told them there is nothing wrong with him and to eat a good breakfast and take a turn in the park. Another doctor — the great Sir William Bradshaw, the most fashionable mental specialist in London, whom Septimus is scheduled to see that afternoon — will recommend confinement in a private nursing home. Septimus does not want to be confined.

On this morning, on this bench in Regent's Park, Septimus has a small hour of peace. The sun is on his face. Rezia is beside him, mending a straw hat she has been making. The trees are full of sparrows. And Septimus, sitting there, hears the sparrows sing. Not sing in the ordinary sense. Sing in Greek, in clear prolonged ancient Greek syllables, the syllables of a language he had tried briefly to learn at school and given up on, the syllables of the poet he had loved best, Aeschylus. The sparrows are singing in Aeschylean Greek, saying his name, telling him that there is no death. Rezia, next to him, sees that he has stopped looking at the ground. She does not know what he is hearing. She asks him quietly if he is well. He smiles at her for the first time in a week.

Woolf — who had been herself in and out of nursing homes for mental collapse since the age of thirteen — is writing, in Septimus, the first serious portrait in English fiction of what the 1920s called shell shock and we would call post-traumatic stress disorder. She is also writing a man who is genuinely seeing something. He is not only ill. He is also, in his illness, in a state the rest of London has no language for. The sparrows are not real. The beauty of what Septimus hears is real. Woolf will hold both of these claims, side by side, for the remainder of the book.

Septimus has been brought to his appointment. Harley Street. A five-guinea consultation fee. The waiting room is pale green with good paintings on the walls. Rezia is permitted to come in. Sir William Bradshaw is a tall grey man of sixty with a beautifully kept moustache and a voice like a small hymn. He asks Septimus a few questions. He has Septimus walk up and down the consulting room. He inspects his eyes. He asks him whether he has ever felt he was a different person. Septimus answers, quietly, some of the truth. Sir William turns to Rezia. Sir William tells Rezia that her husband requires rest. A long rest. Six weeks, at least, in one of Sir William's houses in the country. Sir William has such a house at Blakelands; there is excellent food there, lawns, trees, trained nurses.

Rezia, whose English is not perfect, does not understand at first. She thinks Sir William means a week or two. Sir William explains, gently, with a small reassuring pressure on her shoulder, that it will be longer. It will probably be some months. Husbands in Mr Smith's condition, he says, often require some months. He has — he does not say it, but it is in his voice — assumed that the Smiths have the means. They do not. Sir William's house at Blakelands is twelve guineas a week. Rezia cannot afford it. She does not say so. She nods.

Septimus, sitting in the chair, has heard. He has understood every word. He understands that Sir William is going to take him away from Rezia, put him in a country house with other unwell men, feed him well, subject him to the particular Edwardian treatment — milk, beef, silence, forced rest — and that he will not come out for some months. He understands he is about to be separated from his wife. He understands he is about to lose, in Sir William's gentle and expensive hands, the last recognizable edges of his own life.

Woolf gives us the passage — perhaps the angriest passage in the book — in which she tells us what Sir William Bradshaw's goddess is. It is proportion. Proportion, the measured middle, the calm Edwardian even-handedness, the bedside manner that is also a technique of social control. Sir William, Woolf tells us plainly, makes his living by identifying citizens who fall outside proportion and returning them to it. He makes them eat. He confines them. He separates them from those who love them. He is paid twelve guineas a week per head to do so. He and his wife live in a beautiful house in Harley Street. He has a yacht. He has been given a knighthood. He is, Woolf tells us, an excellent doctor and a monster.

Septimus and Rezia leave the consultation. Septimus will be collected, Sir William tells them, between four and five o'clock this afternoon. They are to go home and pack a small bag. He will be taken to Blakelands tonight. The Smiths walk out into the sunshine of Harley Street. Sir William rings for his next patient.

They have gone home. Their lodging is on the upper floor of a house in Bloomsbury. Rezia, trying to reassure him, has been making a hat, humming a little. Septimus, on the bed, has been watching her. For the first time in a month he has seen her clearly. He has watched her small hands with the straw. He has noticed a curl of her hair at the back of her neck. He has felt, with an exactness he has not had in months, that she is his wife and that he loves her.

He knows Sir William's man is coming at four. It is nearly four.

Woolf gives us the interior of Septimus's last half-hour with the most careful attention in the novel. He has a letter from his insurance office on the mantelpiece. He has his war papers in a drawer. He has Rezia's hat boxes, which she has been earning her living by making. He looks at all of them. He says, to himself, in a voice Woolf records without italics because it does not need them: I will give them something to remember. He means: I will not give them me.

He hears the car at the curb. Sir William's man is downstairs. Rezia has gone down to speak to him. Septimus stands up. He crosses to the window. He opens it. He sits on the sill a moment. He sees the area below with its spiked iron railing. He looks back into the room. He looks at the small cheerful pile of Rezia's hat materials on the table. He says aloud, to no one in particular, I'll give it you. He jumps.

He lands on the railing. He is killed instantly. Rezia, coming up the stairs with Sir William's assistant, hears the sound. She runs up. She sees the open window. She runs to it. She sees, below, the blood and the body. She faints.

Woolf writes the suicide in nine lines. It is over as fast as it would have been in life. She does not dwell. She does not moralize. She does not tell the reader what to think. She simply records the fact that a young veteran of the Somme, when offered the only alternatives the medicine of 1923 could imagine for him, chose the iron railing. And the novel at that moment, without a transition of any kind, returns to Clarissa at the party at Westminster at six o'clock, where Sir William Bradshaw himself — having finished his afternoon — is among the arriving guests.

The party has begun. The guests are arriving in taxis. The Prime Minister himself — as promised — will come by at nine. Richard has gone to greet people. Clarissa, at the door, is performing the hostess's small professional magic of making each arriving couple feel they have been specifically awaited. Old Sally Seton — now Lady Rosseter, married to a rich cotton-mill owner — comes in and kisses her. Peter Walsh is in a corner. The room is full.

Sir William Bradshaw arrives with Lady Bradshaw. They are late. Lady Bradshaw, apologizing, explains: there has been a small distressing professional matter. One of Sir William's patients — a young war veteran — had thrown himself out of a window that afternoon. A sad case. The widow had been in shock. Sir William had waited until the ambulance had been arranged. It was why they were late.

Clarissa, hearing this — Lady Bradshaw has said it quietly in a corner, not meaning any of the guests to overhear — turns away and goes into a small side room by herself. She closes the door. She sits for a moment on the edge of a bed. She is, for perhaps a minute, alone.

And she thinks, in the most famous passage in the book, about the young man she has not met. She thinks: in the middle of my party, here's death. She thinks: he has thrown it away. She thinks about what Sir William Bradshaw's proportion must have been like for the young man. She thinks: a thing there is that matters, a thing wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter — this young man had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate. She thinks about her own life and how much of it is the chatter and how little of it is the thing. She thinks: he has not let them compress the thing out of him. He has kept it.

She goes to the window. She looks at the sky. Across the street she sees an old lady in the opposite house going quietly to bed, putting out her light. She thinks: and yet one goes on. One must go on. One must go down to the party. The old lady across the street is going to bed without drama. She, Clarissa, must go back down to her own chatter, which is also the fabric of her life, and be present for it.

She does. She rejoins the party. She speaks to Peter. She speaks to Sally. The Prime Minister leaves at eleven. The party begins to thin. The last guests stay past midnight. Peter and Sally sit talking about her in the drawing-room, wondering where she has gone, wondering whether she has gone to say goodbye to someone upstairs. And in the last line of the novel — one of the most famous last lines in the English language — Peter looks up and sees Clarissa coming back into the room, and thinks: for there she was.

That is the end of Mrs Dalloway. No plot has been concluded. No explanation has been offered. A young man no one at the party has ever met is dead. A middle-aged woman has, for one minute in a quiet side room, felt his death as her own and then gone back to her party because her life is the party. And Peter Walsh, looking up, sees her in the doorway. For there she was. The sentence is the book's whole argument. There is no other argument. There she was.

Mrs Dalloway is the first novel in English literature to have been structured around a clock. Big Ben strikes, in the course of the book, eleven times. Each strike is heard, at the same instant, by several of the characters, in different parts of the city, and Woolf records the hearing. Clarissa hears it from Bond Street. Peter hears it from a bench in Green Park. Septimus hears it from Regent's Park, and later from his upper room in Bloomsbury. Rezia hears it while making a hat. Richard hears it while crossing Parliament Square with an armful of roses he has bought for Clarissa and will arrive unable to give her with a proper sentence. Elizabeth hears it from a tea shop on the Strand. Sir William Bradshaw hears it between patients.

And Woolf repeats, at each ringing, the phrase from the epigraph. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. She means the visible wave of the bell's sound moving out over the rooftops of London, heavy for an instant, then fading, then gone. Each of her characters is listening to the same wave at the same second from a different neighbourhood. None of them knows about the others. None of them, for the most part, will meet by the end of the book. But they are all, at eleven o'clock on a June morning in 1923, listening to the same bell.

This is the book's deepest structural claim. A modern city is a place in which millions of people, at any given instant, are each the protagonist of his or her own interior life, and in which a single public sound — a bell, a car backfiring, a skywriting plane's message — passes over all of them at once and becomes the only thing they have, in that instant, in common. Woolf had seen that. She had seen that the novel, before her, had not been equipped to describe it. She invented a form in which it could be described.

Big Ben's circles dissolve in the air seven or eight times across the day. By the last striking, close to midnight, the party is ending. Septimus is three hours in his grave. Rezia is asleep on a sedative. Peter is in Clarissa's drawing-room, watching her come back in. The bell on the last page belongs to a city that has held, in its one twenty-four-hour span, a marriage, a failed proposal, a suicide, a successful Prime Minister's visit, the recovery of a thirty-year friendship, and the making of a green hat. The bell has sounded for all of it.

Woolf's method — her tunnelling caves, her single-day compression, her refusal of plot in the Victorian sense — is an argument that this is the true shape of a human day. A novel that takes place across twenty years and pretends to narrate its characters causally is making, she argues, a false promise. A day in which Big Ben strikes twelve times and a woman walks out to buy flowers and comes home to arrange them, and in which in the hours between a young man with Greek on his mind has thrown himself out of a Bloomsbury window, is a more accurate record of what it is like to be alive in a city in 1923. The leaden circles dissolve in the air. Everyone has heard them. No one has heard the same thing. This is the novel.