"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." This is how Virginia Woolf's fourth novel begins, one of the most appreciated by readers. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has been considered not only Woolf's masterpiece, but an essential novel of the English modernist movement, and one of the most important and influential novels of the 20th century. In this extraordinary annotated edition, the renowned writer, academic and literary critic Merve Emre has produced a definitive and unprecedented version of this fundamental work, relying on abundant notes that show Woolf's aesthetic and political ambitions, evidenced in both Mrs. Dalloway and in his personal life and the rest of his literary work.

As is well known, the action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a single day at the end of June, and its plot revolves around Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner busy with the preparations for a party that she will celebrate at her house that same day. night and to which the nation's elite will attend. But beneath the deceptive simplicity of Woolf's premise lies an ingenious satire of the English social system and an innovative exploration of human consciousness. Events flow through the minds of Clarissa and her former suitor, Peter Walsh, but not only of them, but this same process takes place among servants as well as ladies and gentlemen of high society. Woolf's characters, made up of a luminous halo of memories and perceptions, draw a broad portrait of London society, subjected to profound changes after the First World War. And there is no character in the novel who has not been more affected by the war than Septimus Smith, the disturbed war veteran who becomes, unexpectedly, the novel's other key character.