Life in Pieces

Consider an upper-class matron who is planning a party and a suicidal war veteran who sees visions of his dead commanding officer. This unlikely character pairing forms the heart of Virginia Woolf's modernist masterwork, Mrs Dalloway. As Clarissa Dalloway goes about the events of her day, intrusions from her past – particularly, the re-emergence of her ex-lover Peter Walsh – disrupt her peace of mind about her life and marriage. Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith fights a different kind of battle with memory, one that his wife worries he won't be able to win. Woolf's brain-teasing experiments with plot structure, perspective, and stream-of-consciousness narration embody the unrest and fragmentation of British society and culture in the post-World War I years. But more than that, they transform an otherwise straightforward, day-in-the-life sketch of seemingly disparate characters into a poignant study of the effects of the trauma, the effects of memory, the meaning of death and the beauty of being alive.