📖 A relaxing read aloud audiobook excerpt — ideal for unwinding, walking, studying, or resting.

🎧 Audiobook Excerpt from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Read by Chapter Breaks – Short Literary Escapes. Classic audio pills for your commute, bedtime unwind, or a break anytime. At Chapter Breaks, we carefully select and curate iconic passages from classic novels — timeless opening chapters, dramatic turning points, or unforgettable finales. Each episode is around 20–30 minutes, designed to let you dip into great literature without the commitment of a full audiobook. Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway – Opening Passage | Clarissa’s Morning Walk. A June morning in London: bright, fresh, alive — and shimmering with memory. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a modernist landmark, unfolding across a single day in post-war London. Through delicate shifts in consciousness, Woolf captures the quiet triumphs and private tremors of ordinary lives — Clarissa preparing for her party, Septimus confronting his haunting visions, and a city carrying both the scars of war and the pulse of renewal. This episode features the novel’s luminous opening: Clarissa stepping into the morning to “buy the flowers herself,” her thoughts drifting between the present rhythm of London and the remembered summers of her youth. Big Ben tolls, memories rise, the city stirs, and Clarissa feels — with fear, with delight — the sheer, dangerous miracle of being alive. The scene ends just as the outside world fractures the calm: “a pistol shot in the street outside!” A moment that will soon lead us toward Septimus Warren Smith and the deeper undercurrents of the novel. We are about to walk beside Clarissa into the shimmering streets of London — into memory, into sensation, into the fragile brilliance of a single June morning. Let's open the page together, your chapter break begins now.

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