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Sometimes we all have days when we wonder what's going on inside the heads of the people we pass in the street. Like when we're children and lift a stone to reveal all the bustling secret life underneath we'd like to lift off the top of everyone's head and peer inside. In Mrs Dalloway this is what Virginia Woolf does. The novel covers one day in the life of London socialite Mrs Dalloway as she prepares to give a party. Her essentially frivolous concerns, as if world war one never happened, are contrasted with the torment of a working class former soldier suffering from shellshock. But Woolf also enters the head of innumerable other passing characters and this is where the novel often seemed bereft of a coordinated flight path to me. She's trying to peel away the regimented surface of life, show us all the conflict and beauty beneath. I suppose it was revolutionary for its time but like most things revolutionary it sometimes felt disordered to me, as if it needed one more draft. At one point Woolf examines Mrs Dalloway's snobbery but comes across as snobbish herself when she enters the head of the scorned woman. The best bits are fabulous, but there were entire pages where I was unable to follow Woolf on her poetic flights of fancy. So after loving The Waves, I found this a little disappointing. It's much choppier, more rhythmically and thematically inconsistent, a little like a rehearsal for the later book. Afraid it was only 3.5 stars for me.