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