Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, was a bestseller both in Britain and the United States despite its departure from typical novelistic style.The method she used, the representation of the stream of consciousness, reflected her need to go beyond the clumsiness of the factual realism in the novels of her Edwardian precursors, and find a more sensitive, artistic and profound way to represent character, an effort shared with her contemporaries D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Marcel Proust.

In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major situations between characters to push the story forward, Woolf moved her narrative by following the passing hours of a day. The book is composed of movements from one character to another, or of movements from the internal thoughts of one character to the internal thoughts of another.