Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence.Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party.Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those in the day of Septimus Warren Smith.The delicate artistry and lyrical prose of Woolf's fourth novel establish her as a writer of profound talent.

Perhaps Woolf"s greatest achievement in Mrs Dalloway is the extraordinary sense of time in the novel. Chiming clocks mark the passing of the actual day while the past impinges constantly on the thoughts of the protagonists so that in a very few pages an entire lifetime is spanned. Skilfully constructed patterns of imagery consistently connect different moments in the novel. Knife imagery whichfeatures in Mrs Dalloway in connection with Peter Walsh and with Clarissa herself, who was aware that she "sliced like a knife through everything", is also used in different contexts in Jacob"s Room, The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse. In almost all Woolf"s novels, isolated moments of significant experience such as James Joyce would have termed "epiphanies", and with which Woolf was supremely concerned,are marked by poetic use of a background rhythm of waves. In Mrs Dalloway Clarissa reads the lines of Shakespeare"s dirge for Fidele from Cymbeline in an open book in Hatchard"s window,

Fear no more the heat o" the sun Nor the furious winter"s rages.

Throughout the day the words return to her as a soothing incantation,often in conjunction with sea imagery, and worked into the cadence of rolling waves. Septimus uses the same words and the same extended sea imagery in a passage which evokes serenity just before he dies. Woolf connects her two central figures poetically and looks forward to the extended use of wave imagery in To the Lighthouse. Other images of birds and brambles recur, as do images specifically connected with Clarissa. Such controlled echoes enrich Woolf"s prose with lyric intensity. E. M. Foster remarked of Mrs Dalloway that "a method essentially poetic and apparently trifling has been applied to fiction".

An awareness of the political nature of human life pervades Woolf"s fiction, particularly in her treatment of relationships between men and women. The psychology of women and their place in society, with its attendant implications, is a central preoccupation in all her work. Yet Woolf was ambivalent about the contending claims of art and politics and firmly believed that artistic integrity should not be compromised by explicit reference to political issues. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf typically raises feminist issues in an oblique way and with great subtlety.

Virginia Woolf"s method has been likened to that of the postImpressionist painters whose work was introduced to Britain by herclose friend, Roger Fry, and her brother-in-law, Clive Bell. She displays a notable affinity with the Impressionist vision in her concern with communicating the texture of experience, and in the way in which she creates something of permanent relevance out of the apparently diverse and insignificant elements of a fleeting circumstance.She captures the essence of things with delicate artistry. Her genuine humanity and concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence are reflected in her innovative presentation in Mrs Dalloway. E. M. Forster pays tribute to the enduring significance of Virginia Woolf"s work, calling her "a delicate and subtle artist in words who upheld aesthetic and spiritual values in a brutal materialistic age".