A retelling of Virginia Woolf's classic Mrs. Dalloway, from the point of view of the famous socialite's only child, Elizabeth It is 1952 and forty-six-year-old Elizabeth Dalloway-arguably the most inept socialite in all of London-is fresh off yet another of her awkward parties. She feels she has failed at most everything in life, especially living up to her perfect mother-the elegant Mrs. Dalloway, the woman who never made a misstep, the woman who never arrived for her very own party at the end of the 1923 Season. And hasn't been heard from since. Elizabeth has given up ever finding out what really happened that summer until she comes across a WWI medal inscribed with a mysterious message from her mother to a soldier, Septimus Warren Smith. Elizabeth sets out to find a member of his family in the hopes she will finally learn her mother's fate. Her journey takes her across London as she pieces together that last summer of 1923 when Elizabeth was a seventeen-year-old girl who escaped her mother's watchful eye and rebelled against the staid social rules of prewar England. A girl who caroused with the Prince of Wales and sons of American iron barons, a girl determined to do it all differently than her mother. A girl who didn't yet feel like a failure. Faithful to the original yet fully standing alone, Daughter, Dalloway follows Elizabeth as she discovers the truth: though decades have passed and opportunities for women have changed, expectations haven't: to be it all, whatever the costs. And that she shares much more with her mother than she ever knew.
