Clarissa Dalloway sets out on a beautiful morning; she's shopping for flowers for her party that evening. At the same time in London, a young man is suffering from a nightmarish delayed-onset (the year is 1923) form of shell-shock. Clarissa's nearly-grown daughter is distant, and preoccupied. In the course of one day, Peter, a passionate old suitor, returns from India, there is a suicide, Clarissa relives a day in her youth (and her reasons for her choice of a life with the reliable Richard Dalloway).