Central to British mythology of the First World War is the figure of the poet who descends like Orpheus into the Underworld, like Dante into the Inferno, and comes back singing of what he has seen. Several of the poets also wrote immensely successful prose accounts – sometimes lightly fictionalized – of their underworldly experience, with the result that British novels of the war have tended to be overshadowed by those memoirs and by translations of such foreign masterpieces as Henri Barbusse's Le Feu (published in English as Under Fire, 1917) and Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues (published in English as All Quiet on the Western Front, 1939.) Sometimes, too, the often lethal legacy of the war in novels written after it – novels in which the violence has already occurred, as in Greek tragedy, off-stage – tends to be obscured by other events.

Virginia Woolf 's Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens in