La señora Dalloway

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." Clarissa feels the fresh morning air, the soft light of the dawning day—"the same transparency as if it were meant for children on the beach"—and plunges into the street. "How exciting! How refreshing!" She walks through the city and in the bustle finds what she loves: "life, London, that moment in June." As she prepares a party, her mind travels between the present and the past, between what was and what might have been. Her thoughts and memories reveal the fissures of an era: the scars of war, imposed norms, desire, death. Published in 1925, this masterpiece by Virginia Woolf—which inspired the film The Hours—is not only a portrait of a day in a woman's life, but also inaugurated a literary space essential to modernity: that of the female consciousness as a political, intimate, and radical territory.