Clarissa Dalloway, in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, has an interesting relationship to this notion of the muse, for although she is not an artist in the conventional sense of the word, she is so attuned to the vibrations of the city around her, and to the sensibilities and motivations of the people with whom she comes in contact, as well as to her own feelings and memories and desires and regrets, which affect her in ways that the reader is privy to, even when they are so nuanced as to be otherwise unobservable, that the party for which she is preparing throughout the day, and which she herself will host at the end of the novel, becomes for the reader not unlike some work of living art that depends for its success on the manifold ways it must be arranged and accounted for.