# Mrs Dalloway — Character guide

> Key figures in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

- [Clarissa Dalloway](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/clarissa_dalloway.md): A fifty-something London hostess steps out to buy flowers herself, and the whole city—its traffic, its memories, its dead—rushes in to meet her.
- [Septimus Warren Smith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/septimus_warren_smith.md): A decorated veteran walks through London hearing beauty and terror everywhere, while his Italian wife and a Harley Street doctor try to keep him tethered to the world.
- [Peter Walsh](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/peter_walsh.md): Clarissa's old suitor returns from India with his pocketknife, his grumpiness, and the maddening habit of weeping at things he claims not to care about.
- [Richard Dalloway](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/richard_dalloway.md): A Conservative MP and devoted husband who cannot say 'I love you' aloud, so he buys roses instead and hopes the gesture will do the talking.
- [Sally Seton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/sally_seton.md): The wild, brilliant girl who once ran naked down a Bourton corridor and kissed Clarissa, now a married woman arriving at the party she never quite left.
- [Elizabeth Dalloway](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/elizabeth_dalloway.md): Clarissa's teenage daughter, caught between her mother's drawing room and a shabby-genteel tutor, quietly testing what kind of woman she might become.
- [Hugh Whitbread](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/hugh_whitbread.md): Immaculately upholstered, endlessly well-connected, Hugh glides through London on family feeling and a despatch box, adored by Clarissa and loathed by Peter.
- [Lucrezia Warren Smith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/lucrezia_warren_smith.md): A young Italian hatmaker stranded in London, Rezia watches her husband slip away from her and clings to strangers for the comfort he cannot give.
- [Lady Bruton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/lady_bruton.md): A grand, hawk-faced hostess who commands lunches, committees, and the Empire itself, and who finds in Hugh Whitbread the perfect instrument for her schemes.
- [Sir William Bradshaw](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/sir_william_bradshaw.md): A celebrated Harley Street psychiatrist whose serene authority and worship of proportion conceal a will to power over the souls in his care.
- [Dr. Holmes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/dr_holmes.md): A breezy, well-meaning general practitioner who prescribes bromides and golf, and cannot hear a word his patient is actually saying.
- [Evans](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/evans.md): Evans exists in the novel less as a living man than as a presence Septimus cannot shake, surfacing in hallucinations and half-spoken conversations that unsettle everyone around him. The bond between officer and soldier w
- [Joseph Breitkopf](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters/joseph_breitkopf.md): An old friend of the family, remembered from Bourton summers.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mrs_dalloway_se/characters