I feel as if I should be writing an essay on the themes of this novel, its recurring images, its modernism and streams of consciousness that lead to a great sea of life – and then hand it in to be marked. But no – I shall just note what struck me on my first reading.

I’ve never read Ulysses (and have no inclination to), but I assume there are similarities. Is it telling that there is no great legendary female voyager to represent Mrs Dalloway? Her geographical range is narrow – Central London and somewhere in the country – but her temporal range is from girlhood to her current age. There were echoes of The Wasteland too – shell-shocked Septimus and I had not thought death had undone so many, the bells that keep the hours.

Women/girls and flowers/the natural world. We first meet Mrs Dalloway as she sets off to buy some flowers (cut, already picked) for that night’s party; her daughter is now of an age where men see her as a flower to be plucked:

She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking . . .

I found myself very taken by the attempts to encompass everything of a person’s thoughts: the constant flowing between youth and middle age in one’s head while clocks strike the hours:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it?

So many characters whose lives briefly touch. Septimus and his suffering Italian wife. The repellent and conflicted – but also suffering – Miss Kilman. Their lives appear dreadful against the worldly comforts of the Dalloways and their friends. Reticence: Mr Dalloway intends to tell his wife that he loves her, but he passes up the opportunity to yet, involuntarily, he tells his daughter how lovely she is. Age brings with it complications that we are only dimly aware of.

Perhaps Sally’s final words are the ones to be heeded: “What does the brain matter . . . compared with the heart?”

Just brilliant.