`Mrs Dalloway' is a depiction of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, following her preparation throughout the day culminating in a dinner party that evening for her and her husband's bourgeois friends. Through the narrative a parallel is formed between sanity and insanity with moments in the lives of `sane' people connected to Clarissa, and the seemingly unconnected events of Septimus' descent into untreatable madness and ultimately, his suicide.

It is a typical modernist text with dislocated and fractured ideas, feelings and thoughts contained within a thin framework of plot and real events. The modernist movement became popular in the aftermath of the First World War. The modern consciousness was one of futility towards applying meaning to life; a sense of brokenness and tragedy became ingrained in people's psyche from the devastation of war and the loss of loved ones. This alienation and loss of the...