The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite [sic], killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. 

The setting of the novel is London, 1923, five years after the end of World War I. The postwar stability of the city and its inhabitants is tentative, and the effects of the war are still observable in characters like the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith and his young Italian wife, Rezia, whom he met as a soldier in Italy. 

“How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.” 

When Clarissa refuses Peter for Richard Dalloway, he criticizes her in veiled terms, and she feels injured because she does not view herself as someone who would make the perfect hostess. Peter’s criticism of Clarissa has proven itself to be prophetic; after all, though Clarissa felt deeply offended by Peter’s words, on the first day they meet again after Clarissa rejected Peter, she is indeed planning a party, which suggests that Peter is right and she is actually very good at being a hostess.

“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.” 

As Clarissa walks to the flower shop, she travels amongst other Londoners who are simply carrying on with the tasks of their day. No longer can Clarissa distinguish herself from these masses of people, and this experience feels rather bleak to Clarissa.