Clarissa Dalloway, in her fifties, wife of an English MP, emerges from her house in Westminster one fine June morning to buy flowers for her party. And by that simple act she entwines her life with the lives of others who will hear, with her, Big Ben toll away the hours of their destinies that day. "Clarissa's day captures in a definite matrix the drift of thought and feeling in a period, the point of view of a class, and seems almost to indicate the strength and weakness of a civilization." (The New York Times)