Miss Kilman and Clarissa hate each other and are jealous of the other’s influence on Elizabeth. Doris Kilman is poor, unattractive, and bitter, and has been trying to convert Elizabeth to Christianity. Richard leaves and Elizabeth emerges with Doris Kilman, her history tutor. Clarissa considers the privacy of the soul and the gulf that exists between even a husband and a wife. After lunch Richard gets roses for Clarissa and plans to tell her he loves her, but when he sees her finds he cannot say it out loud. The men help Lady Burton write a letter about emigration. Richard Dalloway has lunch with Lady Bruton, a descendant of famous generals, and Hugh Whitbread, a shallow but charming aristocrat. Sir William plans to send Septimus to a mental institution in the country. Holmes, who is convinced that Septimus has nothing wrong with him and is “in a funk.” That afternoon the Smiths visit Sir William Bradshaw, a famous doctor who subscribes to a worldview of “proportion” and is a psychological bully to his patients. He believes his lack of emotion is a crime for which the world has condemned him to death, and he is often suicidal. Septimus was once an aspiring poet, but after the war he became numb and unable to feel.

Septimus imagines that he is a kind of prophet and has hallucinations of his dead soldier friend Evans. Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, wait in Regent’s Park. The point of view shifts to Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I who is suffering from shell shock.

He follows a young woman, idealizing her from afar. Peter leaves when Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth enters, and he walks to Regent’s Park, thinking about Clarissa’s refusal of his marriage offer. Peter and Clarissa have always been very close but also very critical of each other, and their brief meeting is laden with shared memories. Peter was once passionately in love with Clarissa, but she rejected his offer of marriage. She passes a car bearing an unknown but important personage, and an airplane sky writing an advertisement.Ĭlarissa returns home and is visited by Peter Walsh, an old friend from Bourton who has been in India for years. She enjoys the small sensations of daily life and often muses on her late teenage years at Bourton, her family’s country home.

Clarissa is throwing a party that night, and in the morning she walks about London on her way to get flowers. Clarissa Dalloway is an upper-class housewife married to Richard, a politician in the Conservative Party. Dalloway takes place in London during one day and night in mid-June, 1923.

Mrs dalloway cliff notes