"Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that thinks with extraordinary precision and
virtuosity about what modern novelists mean when they talk about
character: how characters are born; how they age and grow; . . . how
they reach for one another in moments of terror and joy, and, finding
nothing solid to hold onto, shrink back, unfurling the dazzling
intricacies of their thoughts like the petals of the flowers Clarissa
Dalloway sees at the florist's shop, each burning in solitude, 'softly,
purely in the misty beds.' The intimacy we are offered with her
characters comes at the expense of the intimacy they cannot offer each
other."
--MERVE EMRE, from the Introduction