Clarissa Dalloway's 'Double' Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is a day-in-the-life story that folds back and forth in time, examining one woman's life decisions and one man's postwar nightmare. The woman is Clarissa Dalloway, a "perfect hostess" in her early fifties, confronts the decisions she made thirty years ago. The man, intended by the author to be Clarissa's "double", is the "shell-shocked" war veteran Septimus Warren Smith who suffers delayed flashbacks over the wartime death of a comrade. The novel follows parallel stories of Clarissa and her "double," whom she has never met. Their lives are connected through interaction of external events in time and space, such as Clar