One day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a June day in London, punctuated accurately, impersonally, unfeelingly, by the chimes of Big Ben and a fashionable party to end it, is the complete story of Mrs. Woolf's new novel, yet she contrives to enmesh all the inflections of Mrs. Dalloway's personality, and many of the implications of modern civilization, in the account of those twenty-four hours. Mrs. Dalloway in her own home is ''the perfect hostess,'' even to her servants, to her daughter, her husband and her rejected suitor of long ago, who cannot free his mind of her. It is almost a perfect being that Mrs. Dalloway enjoys, but there is a resentfulness in her, some paucity of spiritual graces, or rather some positive hideousness.

-NY Times