Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa Dalloway decides to buy the flowers herself, and walks out into a June morning in London to do it. That is nearly the whole plot. The rest of the day — a party to give that evening, an old suitor turned up unannounced from India, a doctor's appointment across town for a young man named Septimus Warren Smith, whom she has never met and never will — happens alongside her, in the same hours, under the same striking of Big Ben, until the two lives that never touch turn out to be about the same thing.

Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925 through the Hogarth Press, and it is built on a technical wager: that a single ordinary day, followed closely enough and from inside enough heads, can hold as much as a plotted novel usually needs a decade for. There are no chapter breaks. The prose moves from one person's thoughts into another's without announcing the change, the way attention actually does, and the effect — intimate, slightly dizzying, exact — is why the book is still taught as one of the clearest demonstrations of what stream-of-consciousness narration can do.

Bibliomancer publishes the complete text, unbroken, exactly as Woolf set it down.