Virginia Woolf ’s novel Mrs Dalloway is regarded as a very important work both in gender and in trauma studies. The present article provides an overview of the cultural history of the interwar period, in order to answer the question why the modernist novel used to be the only possible forum for public talking about trauma at that time. Modernist literature and the rhetoric of the trauma most probably have a lot in common and these analogies become apparent when studying the reception history of Mrs Dalloway. My close reading of the novel works not only within the framework of trauma studies but I also intend to operate with new theoretical contexts, such as the poetics of metamorphoses and theories on the social construction of time regimes. The two protagonists of the novel, Clarissa and Septimus never meet in the story, yet one may perceive a certain communication between them, enabled by the feeling of empathy. Empathy can, as I finally conclude on the basis of the poetics of the novel, temporarily function as a substitute transcendence in the age of modernity.