"What an Extraordinary Night" is an extract from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In this part of te novel, while Clarissa's party is in full swing, Mrs and Mr Bradshaw arrive and tells about the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, a Sir Bradshaw's patient. As soon as Clarissa has known it, she walks away from her guests to reflect about life and death.
The extract is arranged into eight paragraphs, each one has a different rule in the development of Mrs Dalloway's moods and ideas:

- 1st paragraph: Clarissa imagines Septimus's suicide
- 2nd paragraph : Clarissa believes death is a defiance, an attempt to communicate
- 3rd paragraph: she reflects about suicide
- 4th paragraph: according to Clarissa, life is made intolerable by people like Sir William Bradshaw
- 5th paragraph: she thinks that life cam be difficult, but she has the support of her husband.
- 6th paragraph: she contrasts her easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people
- 7th paragraph: she reflects about pleasures brought by activities of day-by-day life
- 8th paragraph: throught her "moment of being", she realizes death is a relief from diseases of life and it is something inevitable, no one can escape from it and it follows that sooner or later everyone will die.

The narrator is used in third person and omniscient.
Like all novel, this extract is made up of Clarissa's thoughts and for this reason many sentences are "loosely constructed", with lots of repetitions and conjunctions.
Therefore, in order to enphatize Mrs Dalloway's feelings, Virginia woolf adds two quotations, both of Shakespeare:

1. "if it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy" (from Shakespeare's Othello)  Clarissa feels depressed and sad for her own life like Othello for Desdemona's death
2. "fear no more the heat of the sun" (from Shakespeare's Cymbeline)  Clarissa understands death and its rules so she is in peace with herself.